Senior AI Engineer I

Summary

Join Khan Academy as a Senior AI Engineer for a 24-month fixed term and integrate AI into our product features. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build AI-driven educational tools, develop testing methods, and maintain AI output quality. Leverage your expertise in generative AI models, prompt engineering, and data analysis to optimize user experience. Stay informed on AI advancements and contribute to ethical AI development in education. This role requires strong technical project management skills and experience in software engineering, data science, or related fields. Khan Academy offers competitive salaries, ample paid time off, a remote-first culture, generous parental leave, and comprehensive benefits.

Requirements

• You have experience working in software engineering, data science, or related technical roles
• You understand what generative AI models are good at and how to elicit the best performance from them
• You have a knack for structured, analytical thought, and you’re detail-oriented with high standards for quality
• You understand techniques—including prompt chaining, RAG, tool-calling, and fine-tuning—for guiding generative AI outputs in service of a robust and performant enterprise product
• Strong technical project management skills
• You’re committed to a careful, iterative, data-driven approach for optimization, innovation,  and continuous experimentation
• You have experience developing evaluation data sets for benchmarking model fit and task-specific performance
• You know how to analyze interaction data, both programmatically and manually, to identify actionable insights to optimize the user experience
• You have experience using data to inform strategic decisions
• You keep informed about developments in AI and take an active interest in emerging research and industry trends, and you understand the implications for our product’s competitiveness and performance
• Your strong communication skills help you collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including educators, developers, and designers
• You can explain technical concepts and create high quality documentation
• You have a history of working cross-functionally to achieve shared success in organization-wide goals and projects
• You’re adaptable to a fast-paced environment, and open to learning new tools and tech
• You’re aware of ethical considerations in AI and machine learning, especially in an educational context, and are familiar with strategies for mitigating bias
• You have a solid understanding of education technology, curriculum development, and learning science
• 5+ years of transferrable technical experience (e.g., software engineering, ML engineering, data science)
• 2+ years applying AI, machine learning, and natural language processing concepts to real world problems
• 1+ years experience related to education (ed tech, instructional design, learning science research, teaching, etc.)
• A high level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models, and a nuanced understanding of their capabilities and limitations
• Empathy for learners around the world
• You love learning and are excited about helping others learn to love learning
• You’re motivated to learn new things and share what you learn with the world
• 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

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with designers, product managers, and engineers to build AI-driven features that support education use cases
• Develop test datasets and evaluation criteria for the evaluation of AI outputs
• Measure, maintain, and improve AI output quality over time via experimentation with prompting, scaffolding, and implementation architectures

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with python and/or go preferred

Benefits

• Competitive salaries
• Ample paid time off as needed – Your well-being is a priority
• 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