Associate Software Engineer (New Grad)

Job Description

Job Description

Our mission is to open the door to the life-changing impact of education. We build market-leading, online college credit and test-preparation solutions that help working adults earn their degrees, advance their careers, and achieve economic mobility. Recognized by Fast Company and GSV 150 as one of the world's most innovative education companies, we are also at the forefront of AI-first learning, combining artificial intelligence with the latest learning science to improve access and outcomes at scale.

Our product is our impact. Through our Keys to College and Keys to the Classroom initiatives, we have saved students over $700 million in tuition and enabled hundreds of thousands of learners to pursue and succeed in careers across nursing, teaching, counseling, business, and other high-demand fields. We are deeply focused on measurable outcomes and building products that create meaningful, lasting change in people's lives.

You're early in your career and you already ship real software with AI coding agents. Here that's just how we work. We want you doing it for millions of learners from your first week.

About the Role

Engineering at Study.com is AI-native. Our engineers direct coding agents every day, inside an agent framework we built ourselves: skills that teach agents our codebase and conventions, guardrails that keep them on the rails, and evaluation that tells us whether the output is good. We define what "done" means and hold the bar on quality, security, and architecture; the agents do the typing. The question on our teams is no longer whether to use AI, but how much further it can go.

You will join a cross-functional team and grow into the work alongside the engineers around you. You will take features from acceptance criteria to production: understand the problem with product and design, break it into work an agent can execute, drive the agents, test what comes back, and see it ship to real students and teachers. This is a role for learning the craft, with the support to do it well. Architecture, security, and system-wide decisions stay with the team while you build toward them. Engineers who grow here move on to larger scope and their own product areas.

This role is based in our Mountain View, CA office and is hybrid in office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship features with AI coding agents (Claude Code and similar tools) as your primary way of producing software.
• Work across our stack: Java and Spring services, MySQL, and TypeScript/React frontend.
• Write the tests and acceptance criteria that tell an agent when a feature is done.
• Work with your team to review and ship your code.
• Flag the skills and guardrails that fail you, and help make them better.
• Follow your features after release: watch the metrics, take the feedback, and learn from the trade-offs your team makes.

Your First 90 Days

• Days 1 to 30: Ship to production in your first week, with help close at hand. By the end of the month you have several features live and you know your way around the product and the codebase.
• Days 30 to 60: Take on larger features. Understand the metric each one is meant to move, ship it, and follow through on what the data says. Land your first improvement to a skill or guardrail the team uses.
• Days 60 to 90: Work on features with more ambiguity in them. Join the technical design discussions for your team's work and start contributing to them. Move faster on the paths you now know well.

What You'll Learn

In your first year you will get good at:

• Breaking a product problem into work an agent can execute well, and spotting when it has not.
• Reading a diff critically, and taking a review on your own work.
• Testing and observability practice on a system that real students depend on.
• Our stack, end to end, and where its load-bearing parts are.
• When to trust what an agent hands you, and when to go read the code yourself.

What You'll Bring to the Role

• Evidence that you build and ship software. Internships, personal projects, open source, and hackathon work all count. Show us the things.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools to build non-trivial functionality, and opinions about where they excel and where they still need a human.
• Working proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (Java or TypeScript preferred) and familiarity with how web applications fit together, front end through database.
• Solid fundamentals in data structures and algorithms.
• Clear written communication. Much of your work is specifying intent precisely, for people and for agents.
• A BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, recently completed or expected before your start date.

Nice to Have

• A portfolio or GitHub that shows a pattern of finishing and shipping things, especially things built largely with agents.
• Experience with Java and Spring, React, SQL, or NoSQL databases.
• Experience writing prompts, skills, or evaluations that make LLM-based tools more reliable.
• A habit of finishing what you start, and of asking about the things that look wrong.

Compensation

The hourly pay range for this position is $43.00 – $59.00 per hour. This range reflects the full pay progression for this level. New hires, including recent graduates, typically begin in the lower portion of the range and grow their pay as they gain experience within the role. Actual pay depends on factors including skills, work experience, business needs, and market demands. This is a non-exempt position and is eligible for overtime in accordance with applicable law.

At Study.com, we know that strong communities are built on the power of our diversity, and we respect and strive to understand for the diverse identities, race, ethnicities, backgrounds, and perspectives of our team members. Our work and company culture have been consistently recognized, including:

• Inc. Best Place to Work
• Fortune Great Places to Work – Best Workplaces in the Bay Area
• Golden Bridge Awards – Gold Winner, Corporate Social Responsibility
• San Francisco Business Times & Silicon Valley Business Journal – Best Places to Work

Study.com provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, veteran or disability status. In addition to federal law requirements.

Study.com complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. Additionally, qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for the position in accordance with applicable state and local laws.