Senior Staff Engineer
Join Udemy. Help definethe future of learning.
Udemy is an AI-powered skills acceleration platform built to help people and teams grow. It’s personalized, practical, and focused on real-world impact.
Our mission is simple: to transform lives through learning. Your work helps people around the world build skills they can use, whether they’re picking up something new or leveling up to stay ahead.
Over 80 million learners and 17,000 businesses already learn with Udemy. If you’re excited by change, energized by learning, and ready to have a real impact, you’ll feel right at home.
Learn more about us on our company page.
Where we work
Udemy is a global company headquartered in San Francisco, with additional U.S. offices in Denver and Austin, and international hubs in Australia, India, Ireland, Mexico, and Türkiye. This is an in-office position in Chennai, requiring three days a week in the office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) and flexibility on Mondays and Fridays.
About this role
As a Senior Staff Engineer within the Globalization team, you will take on the role of technical steward for a pivotal, brand-new investment area. Your core mission will be to establish the service-oriented foundation for Globalization, ensuring our platform can flawlessly connect instructors, learners, and organizations across the globe on their upskilling journey. You will be responsible for architecting and building the scalable backend systems that form the backbone of our mission, directly influencing how learners access education and how creators deliver transformative experiences.
This role provides a unique opportunity to solve large-scale, complex technical challenges. You will move beyond simply writing code to driving technical excellence across multiple engineering teams. By mentoring other engineers and establishing rigorous architectural standards, you will fundamentally shape the future of our engineering culture and the products we deliver.
About your Skills
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Strategic Thinking: You possess a strategic mindset, envisioning the long-term direction of projects and initiatives and making informed decisions that align with organizational goals and drive sustainable growth and innovation.
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Adaptability and Learning Agility: You thrive in dynamic environments, quickly adapting to new technologies, methodologies, and challenges. Your eagerness to learn and ability to pivot effectively contribute to the team's success in a rapidly evolving industry.
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Leadership and Mentorship Abilities: You have a track record of inspiring and empowering team members, providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth within the team.
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Cross-functional Partnership: You excel in managing stakeholder expectations, fostering positive relationships with internal teams, users, and other key stakeholders, and effectively communicating technical decisions, project progress, and milestones.
What you'll be doing
In this role, you will bridge the gap between high-level architectural strategy and hands-on, practical execution. Your decisions will drive impact for millions of users while fostering a company-wide culture of engineering excellence.
Architecture & Technical Strategy
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Design Scalable Systems: Architect and implement fault-tolerant, high-availability, and high-performance microservices capable of supporting millions of concurrent users.
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Lead System Design: Drive and participate in high-level system design reviews, making critical architectural decisions that have a cross-team impact.
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Product Collaboration: Work closely with product teams to translate complex business goals into clear, scalable technical roadmaps and implementable solutions.
Hands-On Engineering
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Full-Stack Development: Actively contribute to the design, development, and deployment of backend and full-stack features using our modern stack, including Kotlin, Spring Boot, Python, Django, and React.
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High-Performance Infrastructure: Build and optimize low-latency systems leveraging Kafka for reliable event streaming and Redis for robust caching strategies.
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Frontend Excellence: Develop and optimize sophisticated React.js applications to ensure exceptional user experiences across all web platforms.
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Quality Assurance: Instill engineering excellence by championing automated testing, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and comprehensive monitoring practices.
Leadership & Mentorship
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Technical Guidance: Lead technical discussions, providing expert guidance on software design patterns, architectural principles, and best practices.
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Team Growth: Mentor and elevate engineers across multiple teams through constructive code reviews and proactive knowledge sharing.
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Innovation: Proactively evaluate and drive the adoption of new technologies, frameworks, and methodologies that enhance engineering efficiency and product capability.
What we're looking for
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Senior Technical Leadership: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a validated history of architecting and successfully delivering complex, large-scale distributed systems.
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Global Experience: Proven experience in launching and scaling products globally, demonstrating an understanding of the nuances involved in building software that adapts to different languages, regions, and cultural contexts.
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Collaborative Mindset: Experience working effectively with global engineering teams across diverse time zones and cultures. Highly proficient in asynchronous communication and fostering alignment in distributed environments.
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Full-Stack Expertise: Deep proficiency in both backend and frontend technologies, with specific experience in Kotlin, Spring Boot, Python, Django, and React. You must be comfortable working across the entire technology stack to solve problems.
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Data & Infrastructure Mastery: Hands-on experience with high-volume data and infrastructure systems, including expertise in Kafka for event streaming and implementing effective Redis caching strategies.
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Architectural Vision: A strong foundation in designing microservices architectures. The ability to clearly articulate the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance in complex distributed systems.
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Mentorship & Influence: A history of mentoring engineers and successfully influencing technical decisions that extend beyond your immediate team. Experience driving organizational adoption of engineering best practices (testing, CI/CD, monitoring).
We understand that not everyone will match each of the above qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!.
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Why work here?
You’ll grow here.Learning is part of the job. You’ll get full access to Udemy courses, a monthly UDay to invest in yourself, and a budget to spend on whatever helps you improve. Many people are diving into AI lately, but what you focus on is up to you.
AI is real here.We use it in the way we learn and the way we work. You’ll have the space and tools to experiment, apply, and get better at using AI in practical ways.
You’ll own your work.We trust people to lead, make decisions, and follow through. You don’t need to wait for permission or layers of approval to have an impact.
You’ll build with others.We collaborate openly and shape ideas together. Everyone has a voice, and good thinking is welcomed from any direction.
You’ll see your impact.What you build helps people grow their skills, change their careers, or find a path forward. You’ve got the experience, why not use it to help others gain theirs?
Bring your curiosity. We’ll bring the platform and the support. Let’s LEARN together.
Our Benefits Start with U
Our benefits start with you and were built to provide you and your family with the protection and care you need, making it easy to access the right coverage when you need it most. Benefits vary by region, and we encourage applicants to review our Australia Benefits, India Benefits, Ireland Benefits, Mexico Benefits, Turkiye Benefits & US Benefits, pages to get an understanding of some of the benefits we offer. For details on region-specific benefits, please refer to the information provided during the hiring process.
Benefits outlined are provided as a general overview and may vary depending on the location, role, and employment classification. All benefits are subject to change at the discretion of the organization and in accordance with applicable laws and policies.
At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability. We understand that not everyone will match each of the qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!
Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.