Hi all,
As you're planning your New Year's resolutions, consider: if you could work anywhere, what would you do?
- Wouldn't you want to work towards really making the world a better place?
- Wouldn't you want to work with a top-notch team alongside some of the brightest engineers in the industry?
- Wouldn't you want to work on solving interesting problems that haven't been solved before?
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At Khan Academy, I truly believe that you can find all of those things and more. We're a small, 50-person non-profit tech startup making a big difference in the world. Here's a testimonial we received just last night:
December 31, 2013
I have recently turned thirteen, and accompanied by your proficient and efficient teaching style, I have successfully advanced into multi-variable calculus. When I was 9 I began Calculus. However when I started these courses, I was capable of grasping these concepts in a deep level of intuition. Now I am advancing into Green's Theorem, Triple Integrals, Divergence, Curl, Gradient, and Partial Derivatives. In essence, I would just like to say thank you for providing this revolutionary interconnected education interface. Hopefully I will be taking the AP Calculus examinations soon!
Thank you for everything!
How cool is that? Think of how many similar students are born to learn advanced math and science but never get the chance. We're working to change this. This letter is one story; every month we hear about hundreds more lives like this that we've totally transformed.
We're starting to do a big mobile push. Around 20% of our traffic comes from phones and tablets but we have only two mobile devs right now. We're totally overhauling our iOS app; if you join us now you can build large parts of a product that's guaranteed to have millions of users. If you are (or you know) a mobile developer we can build a great team around, please reach out. You can't find this sort of opportunity in very many places.
Lots of people know us for Sal's videos, but we also have hundreds of videos by other teachers and a huge library of interactive exercises. Our 100,000+ math problems have been done over 1.5 billion times total. That's a huge number.
With this scale, we're able to study learning in a way that no one has previously been able to do. We've run tests which show that students learn more when they're advanced quicker by a custom machine-learning algorithm [1]. Right now we have dozens of A/B tests running to help us understand what we can do to make people learn more, such as testing how Socratic-style lectures affect engagement. (We're also beginning to release anonymized data to interested researchers.)
Whether you're a machine learning guru or you take pride in perfecting UI details for a dropdown menu [2], we have something for you. You'll be working alongside a small team with the best in the business – though we have "celebrity" devs like jQuery creator John Resig and Google's first employee (and former Director of Technology) Craig Silverstein, we have many more you haven't heard of but who are just as awesome.
We really have a great team and culture. We use (and contribute to) new technology [3], we invest heavily in mentoring interns (and full-timers) [4], we have lots of fun at and around work [5], and even though we're a non-profit, we pay well too.
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As I said above, mobile is a big priority for us and we're doing everything we can to find great mobile devs.
We're hiring engineers (frontend, backend, mobile, data science), product designers, a community manager, and more. And if you want to have an amazing summer (or fall or spring) building real features for real users, we're hiring interns too.
Please apply at <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/careers" > directly (say you saw us on HN!), but if you have questions, feel free to ask here or to email me at alpert+REDACTED_EMAIL.
Thanks for reading; have a great 2014!
[1]: <a href="http://derandomized.com/post/51729670543/khan-academy-machine-learning-measurable-learning" >
[2]: <a href="http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown" >
[3]: <a href="http://joelburget.com/backbone-to-react/" > (sorry about the background, but there are dinosaur pictures!)
[4]: <a href="http://bjk5.com/post/71559049069/the-most-common-feedback-we-give-dev-interns" >
[5]: <a href="http://life.khanacademy.org/" >
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)