Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI & Customer Solutions

Job Overview

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will join a fast-paced innovation team that builds and deploys AI-powered solutions directly with Coursera's enterprise and campus customers. You will sit at the intersection of AI/Data Engineering, cloud and security architecture, and customer-facing solutioning — working hands-on with customers to map their workflows and data, prototype solutions quickly, and harden the ones that prove valuable into production deployments.

You'll operate across the full engagement lifecycle: scoping a customer's environment and pain points like a consultant, prototyping working demos in real time with the customer, and then hardening the strongest patterns into production-grade, secure and compliant deployments. This role is customer-facing and will require regular travel to customer sites (domestic and occasionally international) for discovery, prototyping, and go-live phases of engagements. You will work closely with Product Managers, AI Specialists, Data Analysts, and other Engineers on the team, and directly with customer executive sponsors and IT/data owners, to decide what gets standardized, deployed, or retired.

Key Responsibilities

• Scope customer environments directly with executive sponsors and IT/data owners — mapping systems, data models, and workflows to identify the real business problem, not just the stated one
• Rapidly prototype and demo working solutions in front of customers, iterating in real time to prove value fast
• Serve as the bridge between customer & core engineering team to harden validated prototypes into production deployments
• Design and implement multi-tenant, hybrid, or customer-controlled deployment architectures, as per customer's data residency, privacy, and IT-maturity requirements
• Build and own identity and access management, encryption, and secure cross-network connectivity (mTLS, VPC peering/PrivateLink, API gateways) for customer-embedded deployments
• Bring security, data-residency and compliance judgment into discovery conversations before a commercial commitment is made, not after
• Own CI/CD, observability, and production support for systems living inside customer environments
• Recognize repeatable patterns across customer engagements and feed field evidence back to Product to inform what should be standardized, deployed more broadly, or retired
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, AI Specialists, and Program Managers to scope problem statements with a laser focus on customer and business impact
• Travel to customer sites as needed (expect regular travel) to support scoping, prototyping, and go-live phases of an engagement, including in-person workshops and executive readouts

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in a software engineering role, with strong hands-on backend engineering and cloud infrastructure experience
• 1+ years of experience building production-grade agentic AI solutions
• Proficiency in backend languages such as Python, Java, Typescript and technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes and Kafka with comfort working across the stack
• Deep understanding of cloud platforms (AWS preferred), able to design and operate both multi-tenant and hybrid customer-cloud deployment models
• Strong experience with data engineering fundamentals — ingesting, cleaning, and normalizing messy, inconsistent customer data across disparate source systems
• Working knowledge of identity and access management, encryption/key management, and secure network patterns (VPC peering, PrivateLink, mTLS) for customer-embedded or regulated environments
• Demonstrated comfort operating directly with customers — scoping ambiguous problems, running discovery, and demoing work-in-progress solutions live, in person and remotely
• Willingness and ability to travel regularly to customer sites, domestically and occasionally internationally, as engagement needs require
• Prior experience leading projects and debugging complex issues with minimal supervision

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modern agentic AI tooling such as LangChain, LangGraph, FastMCP, RAG, or MCP
• Experience with Postgres, DuckDB, pgvector, or similar analytical/transactional data layers
• Prior experience in a solutions engineering, professional services, or technical consulting role where you owned a customer relationship end-to-end, including on-site engagement
• Familiarity with data privacy and residency regimes relevant to enterprise/education/government customers (e.g., GDPR, FERPA, DPDPA, HIPAA)
• Demonstrated ability to work in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and make sound technical trade-offs with limited guidance
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical constraints into terms an executive sponsor or non-technical stakeholder can act on

Why Join Us?

• Work on high-visibility engineering problems with direct, measurable impact on enterprise and campus customers
• Work directly with strategic customers across geographies, owning engagements end-to-end rather than a narrow slice of a roadmap
• Directly influence what graduates from customer-facing custom solutions into Coursera's core product
• Be part of a lean, cross-functional team (Engineering, AI Specialists, Product, Program Management) with high autonomy and high trust and become a go-to technical leader
• Be part of a mission-driven company transforming global access to education and upskilling in the AI era