---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer,  Infrastructure at Learning Commons'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-infrastructure-learning-commons-redwood-city-f8vmggfenzf6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Senior Software Engineer,  Infrastructure at Learning Commons

- **Company:** Learning Commons
- **Location:** Redwood City, CA
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-03-07
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/education/jobs/7689848

## Job description

Learning Commons aims to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner by building AI infrastructure that better connects the way students learn to the tools they learn with.

The Team

At Learning Commons, we pair technology with grantmaking to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner. We aim to translate what learning science tells us about how students learn best into classroom practice. With the advent of generative AI, that translation work can be accelerated and scaled to have a greater impact.

Our mission is to bring learning science into the tools used every day by teachers and students, ensuring that technology reflects the realities of classrooms and strengthens teaching and learning.

In today’s fragmented edtech landscape, school districts are often left piecing together products that don’t always align with curricula or instructional needs. While AI holds enormous potential to support educators, it can only deliver on that promise when grounded in research, high-quality educational data, and expert evaluation. That’s why we’re building open, public-purpose infrastructure — datasets, rubrics, and resources — that help raise the standard for educational tools and create more consistent, impactful learning experiences for all students and teachers.

At our core, we are builders, and our unique builder philanthropy approach is what sets us apart from other education funders. Take a closer look at the [highlights and significant milestones](https://chanzuckerberg.com/education/impact/) of CZI’s first eight years of education work.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a strong Senior Software Engineer with deep infrastructure experience to help build and scale the systems that power our Learning Commons platform and AI-enabled educational tools. This role offers the opportunity to work across the stack — from backend services and APIs to cloud infrastructure and CI/CD — ensuring our systems are reliable, secure, and easy for engineers to build upon.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Education Tech engineering team, you’ll play a key role in designing and implementing production-grade systems that support experimental educational applications and AI developer tooling. You’ll partner closely with product, data, and platform engineers to improve system performance, strengthen observability, and streamline developer workflows.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role where you’ll own meaningful technical initiatives within the team — improving reliability, scaling services, and enhancing the developer experience through thoughtful engineering. You’ll collaborate with Trust, Security, and product engineering teams to ensure our infrastructure aligns with best practices while remaining pragmatic for a fast-moving, early-stage environment.

If you’re passionate about building robust systems, improving developer velocity, and working on technology that supports educators and students, we’d love to connect.

## What You'll Do

- Build Across the Stack – Design and implement scalable backend services, APIs, and infrastructure that power our Learning Commons platform and AI-enabled tools.
- Strengthen Cloud & DevOps Foundations – Improve cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, CI/CD workflows, and deployment automation to increase reliability and developer velocity.
- Own Reliability & Performance – Enhance observability, monitoring, and incident response practices; debug and resolve production issues across application and infrastructure layers.
- Improve Scalability & Developer Experience – Identify bottlenecks and drive pragmatic improvements that make systems faster, safer, and easier to build on.
- Collaborate & Raise the Bar – Partner with product, data, security, and platform teams; contribute to design discussions, code reviews, and shared engineering standards.

## What You'll Bring

- Strong Engineering Fundamentals – Proven experience building and operating production systems in cloud-native environments.
- Infrastructure & DevOps Depth – Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, containerized systems, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud architecture.
- Modern Tooling Fluency – Experience with tools such as Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Kubernetes, Docker, Grafana, Databricks (or comparable technologies).
- Operational Excellence Mindset – Experience with observability, monitoring, and incident response; comfortable debugging complex distributed systems.
- Systems Thinking – Solid understanding of scalability, networking, and secure system design, with pragmatic decision-making in fast-moving environments.
- Collaborative Communication – Ability to contribute to technical design discussions, align cross-functionally, and elevate engineering standards within a team.

## Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $190,000 - $261,800. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process.

This position may be eligible to participate in Learning Commons' discretionary annual performance bonus program. Bonus eligibility and targets are determined in accordance with Learning Commons' total rewards philosophy and may vary by role.

Better Together

As we grow, we’re excited to strengthen in-person connections and cultivate a collaborative, team-oriented environment. This role is a hybrid position requiring you to be onsite for at least 60% of the working month, approximately 3 days a week, with specific in-office days determined by the team’s manager. The exact schedule will be at the hiring manager's discretion and communicated during the interview process.

## Benefits for the Whole You

We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible.

- Provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
- Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice.
- Funding for select family-forming benefits.
- Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving

If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.

#LI-Hybrid

## About Learning Commons

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Learning Commons is a nonprofit organization building open, public-purpose AI infrastructure to help translate learning science research into classroom practice and raise the standard for educational technology.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Nonprofit, part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ecosystem)
- **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2025 (launched as a standalone initiative building on a decade of work by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative)
- **Founders**: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan (via the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative); led by Sandra Liu Huang

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Education Technology (Edtech), AI Infrastructure, Learning Science
- **Target customers**: Developers building educational tools, school districts, educators, researchers, and other edtech organizations
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To bring learning science into the tools used every day by teachers and students, ensuring that technology reflects the realities of classrooms and strengthens teaching and learning. The organization is dedicated to making learning science accessible to all and building open, shared foundations for AI in education.

## Products & Services
- **Knowledge Graph**: A structured, machine-readable network of high-quality curricula, state standards, and learning science research. This open dataset helps developers create more accurate and pedagogically sound AI outputs by providing a precise, instructionally-aligned foundation.
- **Evaluators**: Expert-backed rubrics that assess AI-generated content for educational quality and alignment with learning science. This tool allows developers and educators to rigorously evaluate AI outputs before they reach students.
- **Curriculum Sync**: A curriculum integration tool that helps school districts bring open educational resources into their Learning Management Systems (LMS) with greater adaptability, ease, and lower administrative burden.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (Nonprofit organization)
- **Key Metric**: The organization’s tools and resources currently reach more than 5 million students through its partners and products.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Funded and operated under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Partners include school districts, researchers, educational experts, and other funders in the education ecosystem.
- **Growth Signals**: The organization is actively hiring for senior technical roles (Senior Software Engineer, Senior Data Scientist), indicating a phase of active team building and product development. LinkedIn data shows 7 employees with a +20% monthly headcount growth rate.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep research foundation**: Built on a decade of learning science investment by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, providing a unique depth of expertise and credibility.
- **Open, public-purpose infrastructure**: Unlike many for-profit edtech companies, Learning Commons is committed to creating open datasets and standards that benefit all educators and developers, not just paying customers.
- **Strong ecosystem connections**: Direct access to CZI’s network of researchers, educators, and school districts, as well as a mandate to convene the broader education ecosystem.
- **Nonprofit mission focus**: The organization’s structure allows it to prioritize pedagogical soundness and public good over commercial incentives, a strong differentiator in the AI-in-education space.

## Strategic Focus
- **Building shared, open infrastructure**: The primary focus is on developing the open datasets, standards, and rubrics that are currently missing from the edtech landscape.
- **Convening the ecosystem**: Actively bringing together funders, researchers, technologists, and educators to align efforts and accelerate progress.
- **Deep collaboration with educators**: Working directly with school districts and teachers to ensure tools reflect real classroom needs and constraints.
- **Rigor and safety**: Prioritizing the privacy and safety of educators and learners while ensuring AI tools are grounded in proven learning science.

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven impact**: The opportunity to work on a well-funded, high-impact nonprofit initiative that aims to fundamentally improve how technology supports teaching and learning for millions of students.
- **Top-tier compensation**: Average salary reported at $214,150, which is competitive with for-profit tech companies [edtech.com](https://www.edtech.com/companies/learning-commons).
- **Strong engineering culture**: The organization brings together "world-class engineering" with deep learning science knowledge, offering a chance to work on technically challenging problems (AI infrastructure, large-scale data, evaluation systems) with a clear social purpose.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: Not explicitly stated, but headquarters are in Redwood City, CA. The team is currently entirely US-based.
- **Notable perks**: Being part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative ecosystem provides stability, resources, and access to a network of experts across technology, philanthropy, and education.
- **Growth opportunity**: As a relatively new organization (founded 2025) with a small team (~7 employees), early hires will have significant influence on shaping the product, culture, and strategic direction.

## Sources
1. [learningcommons.org - About Us](https://learningcommons.org/about-us/)
2. [learningcommons.org - Homepage](https://learningcommons.org/)
3. [edtech.com - Learning Commons Profile](https://www.edtech.com/companies/learning-commons)
4. [LinkedIn - Learning Commons](https://www.linkedin.com/company/learningcommons)
5. [learningcommons.org - Careers](https://learningcommons.org/careers/)

## Other roles at Learning Commons

- [Product Trust Manager, Education](https://feeny.ai/job/product-trust-manager-education-learning-commons-redwood-city-n2g571dehwgz) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Strategic Partnerships Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-strategic-partnerships-analyst-learning-commons-redwood-city-rz7per6qkm21) — Redwood City, CA
- [Staff Forward Deployed Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-forward-deployed-engineer-learning-commons-redwood-city-qhv32bakbmrc) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Manager, Engineering, Knowledge Graph](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-engineering-knowledge-graph-learning-commons-redwood-city-3tqgm879chwy) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Data Scientist, Education](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-data-scientist-education-learning-commons-redwood-city-z0ns9jq02cdf) — Redwood City, CA