Senior/Staff Software Engineer

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Interactives)

Company: Brilliant
Location: Remote (United States or Canada); offices in San Francisco and New York
Compensation: $180,000 - $250,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Not available

About Brilliant

Brilliant is building the world's first graphical AI tutor: interactive learning experiences that both the learner and the AI tutor can see and manipulate, designed to get people to actually think and solve hard problems in math, science and programming. It reaches 10M+ learners and serves hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers.

Founded in 2012 and backed by Social+Capital, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital and Learn Capital, Brilliant is profitable ("default alive"). Its small, AI-enabled engineering team includes former founders, early Google Brain and OpenAI engineers, and former VPs of Engineering at public companies.

The Role

This role is on the Inner Loop team, which owns the interactive learning experiences and the AI tutor. You will build the interactive building blocks behind those experiences: composable primitives that learning designers, authoring agents and the tutor can use to compose and extend lessons. Every interactive exposes an API used by humans and AI, and every configuration must be a correct, solvable, meaningful puzzle. The work is rendering-heavy, mostly in Elm with significant TypeScript, and the team adopts AI tooling aggressively.

What You Will Do

• Build new interactive building blocks that make foundational concepts engaging to master.
• Design clear, expressive APIs for learning designers, the content agent and the AI tutor.
• Own learning experiences end to end on a cross-functional pod with Product, Design and Content.
• Solve complex web rendering and performance problems in an environment closer to a game engine than a typical web app.
• Write simple, robust, readable code that teammates and LLMs can extend.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of professional web-focused software engineering, ideally including game development, animation or interactive media
• Depth in complex web rendering and performance: browser APIs, canvas, and the web as a platform
• A portfolio of interactive web work you built independently (experiments, games, explainers or rendering projects)
• The ability to explain both the technical underpinnings and the user and business impact of your work
• Constant, intentional use of AI tools, with a clear point of view on effective AI-enabled engineering

Nice to Have

• Elm, Haskell or other functional languages, or a clear appetite to learn
• Teaching or education-tools background
• Early-stage experience on interactive canvas products (whiteboards, design tools)
• Startup or founding experience

Benefits

Medical, dental and vision premiums covered 100%, flexible PTO (about six weeks a year by team norm), home office equipment, a professional development stipend, free food at the SF and NYC offices, and a transparent compensation framework.

REVENUE: 15% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $27K-$38K; 1 seat(s).

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Khan Academy, Duolingo, Figma, Miro, tldraw, Observable, game studios (Unity/Roblox).

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 7+ yrs; web rendering/canvas/perf depth; interactive portfolio; heavy AI-tool use; visa: NO sponsorship; location: Remote US/Canada.