Senior Platform Engineer, ML Data Systems (24 months fixed-term)

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects focusing on math and science. We have over 181 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY

Our students teachers and parents come from all walks of life and so do team includes people from academia traditional/non-traditional education big tech companies and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company value diversity equity inclusion and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

Were looking for an ML Data Engineer to evolve our eval dataset tools to meet the growing platform needs of AI-based tutoring at Khan Academy. Were looking for someone who can gather internal requirements design schema based on well-known dataset patterns and deploy document and train people on an internal dataset management framework. The systems you design will need to integrate with trace management and human labeling APIs. Youll work closely with other AI engineers platform developers and labeling teams to ensure our data is clean representative and ready for both human and automated evaluation.

This role bridges ML operations data engineering and data science enabling our AI systems to learn from reliable well-structured datasets that reflect the diversity and nuance of real learners.

As a Platform Engineer focused on dataset management systems you will:

• Evolve and maintain pipelines for transforming raw trace data into ML-ready datasets.
• Clean normalize and enrich data while preserving semantic meaning and consistency.
• Prepare and format datasets for human labeling and integrate results into ML datasets.
• Develop and maintain scalable ETL pipelines using Airflow DBT Go and Python running on GCP
• Implement automated tests and validation to detect data drift or labeling inconsistencies.
• Collaborate with AI engineers platform developers and product teams to define data strategies in support of continuously improving the quality of Khans AI-based tutoring.
• Contribute to shared tools and documentation for dataset management and AI evaluation.
• Inform our data governance strategies for proper data retention PII controls/scrubbing and isolation of particularly sensitive data such as offensive test imagery

We are a remote-first organization and we strive to build using technology that is best suited to solving problems for our learners. Currently we build with Go GraphQL JavaScript React & React Native Redux and we adopt new technologies like LLMs when theyll help us better achieve our goals. At Khan one of our values is Cultivate Learning Mindsets so for us its important that were working with all of our engineers to help match the right opportunity to the right individual in order to ensure every engineer is operating at their learning edge.

Currently we are focused on providing equitable solutions to historically under-resourced communities of learners and teachers and guided by our Engineering Principles. You can read about our latest work on our Engineering Blog.

A few highlights:

• Incremental Rewrites with GraphQL
• Our Transition to React Native
• Go Services One Goliath Project
• How Engineering Principles Can Help You Scale
• How to upgrade hundreds of React components without breaking production

WHAT YOU BRING

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Data Engineering or a related field.
• 5 years of Software Engineering experience with 3 of those years working with large ML datasets especially those in open-source repositories such as Hugging Face
• Strong programming skills in Go Python SQL and at least one data pipeline framework (e.g. Airflow Dagster Prefect).
• Experience with data versioning tools (e.g. DVC LakeFS) and cloud storage systems.
• Familiarity with machine learning workflows from training data preparation to evaluation.
• Familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models and a nuanced understanding of their capabilities and limitations.
• Attention to detail and an obsession with data quality and reproducibility.
• Motivated by the Khan Academy mission to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.
• Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness awareness of other and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives attitudes and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization.

Preferred

• Experience with labeling platforms (e.g. Label Studio Scale AI Toloka) or human-in-the-loop systems.
• Understanding of ML evaluation techniques including prompt-based and generative model metrics.
• Exposure to MLOps practices such as model registry feature store or continuous evaluation.
• Background in education technology or other human-centered AI applications.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit but we reward our talented team extremely well! We offer:

• Competitive salaries
• Ample paid time off as needed Your well-being is a priority
• 8 pre-scheduled Wellness Days in 2026 occurring on a Monday or a Friday for a 3-day weekend boost
• Remote-first culture - that caters to your time zone with open flexibility as needed at times
• Generous parental leave
• An exceptional team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to do your best
• The chance to put your talents towards a deeply meaningful mission and the opportunity to work on high-impact products that are already defining the future of education
• Opportunities to connect through affinity ally and social groups
• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical dental vision and life

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices the well-being of our employees and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries and extensive benefits and perks to support physical mental and financial well-being.

The target salary range for this position is $137871 - $172339 USD / $186306 - $232883 CAN. The pay range for this position is a general guideline only. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidates relevant skills experience qualifications and job market data.

MORE ABOUT US

• Sals TED talk from 2011
• Sals TED talk from 2015
• Sals TED talk from 2023
• Our team: COMPANY VALUES

  Live & breathe learners

  We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights research and experience to build content products services and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

  Take a stand

  As a company we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However we also listen learn and flex in the face of new data and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

  Embrace diverse perspectives

  We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made we commit to moving forward as a united team.

  Work responsibly and sustainably

  We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

  Bring out the joy

  We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates partners and donors.

  Cultivate learning mindset

  We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings ourselves and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and arent afraid to fail. We dont let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

  Deliver wow

  We insist on high standards and deliver delightful effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things each of which aligns to our ambitious vision so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

  We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race color ancestry religion sex gender gender identity or expression national origin sexual orientation age citizenship marital status disability or Veteran status. We value diversity equity and inclusion and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.
  
  As part of this commitment Khan Academy will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process. If reasonable accommodation is needed please contact