Coursera was launched in 2012 by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller with a mission to provide universal access to world-class learning. It is now one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, with 183 million registered learners as of June 30, 2025. Coursera partners with over 350 leading university and industry partners to offer a broad catalog of content and credentials, including courses, Specializations, Professional Certificates, and degrees. Coursera’s platform innovations enable instructors to deliver scalable, personalized, and verified learning experiences to their learners. Institutions worldwide rely on Coursera to upskill and reskill their employees, citizens, and students in high-demand fields such as GenAI, data science, technology, and business. Coursera is a Delaware public benefit corporation and a B Corp.
We’re a global platform aiming to transform lives through learning by offering transformative courses, certificates, and degrees that empower learners worldwide to advance their careers through skill mastery. We’re looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners eager to shape the future of education. If you’re ready to build the global programs and tools that fuel the power of online learning, join Team Coursera.
At Coursera, we are committed to building a globally diverse team and are thrilled to extend employment opportunities to individuals in any country where we have a legal entity. We require candidates to possess eligible working rights and have a compatible timezone overlap with their team to facilitate seamless collaboration.
Coursera has a commitment to enabling flexibility and workspace choices for employees. Our interviews and onboarding are entirely virtual, providing a smooth and efficient experience for our candidates. As an employee, we enable you to select your main way of working, whether it's from home, one of our offices or hubs, or a co-working space near you.
Job Overview:
As a Backend Software Developer on the Payments team, you'll have a real opportunity to innovate, productize, and iterate at startup speed. You will take significant technical ownership for Coursera's Payments platform, building and scaling a checkout & payment experience for consumers. This role will involve both at-scale product innovation and new initiatives in the zero-to-one phase, directly contributing to Coursera's top-line growth and helping bring high-quality, affordable education to millions of learners across the globe. You'll contribute to service architecture, product API development, and data modeling. Our backend developers mostly work with modern Java (16+), MySQL, DynamoDB, gRPC, GraphQL (DGS), and Kafka within a microservices.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement scalable systems and infrastructure for the payments platform
- Measure your work thoroughly, analyze results, and generate hypotheses to drive new product changes through A/B testing for payment solutions
- Set up monitoring and testing of your APIs and services to better understand the real-time health of your payment products
- Collaborate with cross-functional product, design, engineering, and services teams to ensure a thorough and thoughtful end-to-end implementation journey for payment features
- Contribute to the conceptualization of new payment solutions with a problem-first, data-driven, and test & iterate approach, ensuring a platform and long-term view
Basic Qualifications:
- 5+ years of experience working in a relevant software engineering role
- Expertise in designing highly-scalable and performant micro-services and storage layers using common frameworks, languages, and infrastructure (e.g., Java, MySQL, Cassandra, Solr, Kafka)
- Comfortable working in a fast-moving team environment (we deploy many times a day!)
- Data-driven and strongly motivated by success and learnings through experiments and metrics analysis
- Experience in building and launching successful products, particularly with an understanding of defining and managing APIs and system and data architecture
- Strong commitment to Coursera's mission of transforming lives through learning
Preferred Qualifications:
- You have expertise in managing checkout & payments, including experience with payment gateways, APIs, and SDKs (e.g., Stripe, Braintree, Razorpay)
- You are familiar with mobile payments through Google Play Billing and Apple In-App Purchases
- You understand payment industry standards and regulations (e.g., PCI DSS, PSD2, 3DS 2.0)
If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera:
- Object Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond Specialization
- The Future of Payment Technologies
- Learning How to Learn
Compensation:
Coursera offers competitive pay and equitable compensation practices. Our job titles may span more than one career level. The targeted hiring base salary range for this role is between CAD 158,400 - 198,000 for all Canada candidates. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, including but not limited to prior work experiences, training/education, transferable skills, business needs, and geographical location. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role may also be eligible for variable pay, equity, and benefits.
