Sr. Prompt Engineer

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 155 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

As a Senior Prompt Engineer, you’ll take responsibility for the scoping, development, maintenance and improvement of the prompts that drive Khanmigo experiences through collaboration with our Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Content teams.

You will:

• Build up a library of high quality prompts or prompt chains to accomplish a variety of tasks, with documentation to help internal users find and view prompts.
• Discover, develop, test, and document best practices for prompt creation and testing, editorial workflows, and evaluation tests.
• Work with User Research and Product Management to prioritize and implement high impact prompt engineering projects.
• Collaborate with designers, product managers, and engineers to create prompt-driven features.

WHAT YOU BRING

Growth mindset

• A true passion for education and a desire to change the world for the better.
• An entrepreneurial mindset, including a high tolerance for ambiguity, a penchant for experimentation, and a bias towards action.
• Kind collaboration: you’re a detail-oriented team player, and people love working with you.
• Outstanding creative problem-solving skills: you embrace challenges, and love working cross-functionally to clarify requirements and solve puzzles. You enjoy identifying core principles that can translate across scenarios. You know how to troubleshoot issues with performance and can devise creative solutions to improve the user experience.

Strong execution

• Prompt design and evaluation: You’re skilled in crafting effective prompts and evaluating their outputs for accuracy, relevance, and helpfulness. You have an engineer’s knack for structured, analytical thought, and you’re detail-oriented with high standards for quality. You understand strategies for guiding LLM outputs—including prompt injection and chaining and others—to drive a useful, efficacious, delightful and safe learning experience.
• Testing and quality assurance: You can ensure that we optimize our AI-powered activities to meet educational standards and exceed our users’ expectations. You’re committed to a careful, iterative, data-driven approach for optimization, innovation, and continuous experimentation.
• Innovative Prompt Engineering: You have the skill to develop prompts for both straightforward LLM dialogues and groundbreaking, complex user experiences. Your role involves innovating beyond traditional LLM applications.
• Data Analysis: You know how to analyze interaction data, and can translate into actionable insights to optimize the user experience.
• Strategic thinking: You have experience using data to inform strategic decisions.
• Learner and teacher focus: You understand instructional design, you have deep teacher and learner empathy, and you know how to ensure our learning experiences are user-friendly and pedagogically effective. You have experience creating and solving problems for a variety of user personas for K-12 and beyond (eg math teacher, reading student, different grade levels). You have an intuition for when content in any area could benefit from more clarity, simplification, or research.
• Research: You keep informed about developments in AI, and take an active interest in emerging research and industry trends, and you understand their implications for our product’s competitiveness and performance.
• Communication: Your strong communication skills help you collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, including educators, developers, and designers. You enjoy teaching technical concepts and creating high quality documentation.
• Collaboration: You have a history of working cross-functionally to achieve shared success in organization-wide goals and projects.
• Technical Proficiency: You can utilize programming languages and tools relevant to interacting with AI APIs (such as Python) to help meet user requirements. (preferred)
• Flexibility: You’re adaptable to a fast-paced environment, and open to learning new tools and tech.
• Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation: You’re aware of ethical considerations in AI and machine learning, especially in an educational context, and are familiar with strategies for mitigating bias.

Desired background/experience:

• Bachelor’s degree, with a concentration in education-related or learning science preferred; Master’s degree preferred. Broad subject matter expertise (STEM and Humanities) to collaborate effectively with subject matter experts to guide the AI towards high quality outputs across a wide range of subjects.
• 3-5 years of relevant or transferrable experience (for example: learning science background in edtech, product management, teaching, and tutoring; other development of AI-powered experiences through feedback, testing, and data)
• 2+ years instructional design experience, combining disciplinary expertise, pedagogical research, and teacher and learner empathy (preferred)
• A high level familiarity with the architecture and operation of large language models, and a clear and nuanced understanding of their capabilities and limitations.
• A solid grasp of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing concepts.
• Proficiency in logic, control flows, data structures, and algorithms.
• 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.
• Motivation for Khan Academy’s mission “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”

Please note: We require a cover letter to be enclosed with your application. See the application questions for specific instructions.

PERKS AND BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well! We offer:

• 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

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices, the well-being of our employees, and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries, and extensive benefits and perks to support physical, mental, and financial well-being.

The target salary range for this position is $127,423 - $159,279 USD / $159, 278 - $199,098 CAD. The pay range for this position is a general guideline only. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data. Exceptional performers in this role who make an outsized contribution can make well in excess of this range. Additional incentives are provided as part of the complete total rewards package in addition to comprehensive medical and other benefits.

MORE ABOUT US

Our US content team includes the curriculum developers who design the curriculum and develop the courses, lessons, videos, articles, and practice questions on Khan Academy. In the years ahead, as we increase the depth and breadth of the courses we offer, we’ll be integrating AI into many of the learning experiences we build: our AI-powered tutor and teaching assistant, Khanmigo, is a critical component of the company’s strategic vision.

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011
• Sal’s TED talk from 2015
• Sal’s TED talk from 2023
• Our team: http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don’t let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.