Brilliant.org careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Brilliant was seeded by Social+Capital in 2013 after founder Sue Khim's Launch Festival presentation caught Chamath Palihapitiya's attention. The company does not publicize its later rounds; third-party trackers (PitchBook, Caplight) list a Series B and a May 2022 Series C and put total funding in the $67M to $73M range, but Brilliant itself has not announced these figures. Its own messaging emphasizes running a real, revenue-generating business over fundraising.

Brilliant.org teaches math, computer science and science through interactive problem solving rather than lecture videos: guided courses built from puzzles, games and an interactive graphical canvas, with the stated mission of "creating a world of better problem solvers". Each interactive building block is driven by APIs designed for learning designers, an LLM-powered content agent and an AI tutor, engineered so that every possible configuration is a correct, solvable and meaningful puzzle. The company says it serves hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers on a freemium model, and Wikipedia puts the user base at roughly 10 million as of 2025.

Sue Khim co-founded Brilliant in San Francisco in 2012, pivoting out of an earlier edtech startup called Alltuition, and attracted investment from Chamath Palihapitiya's Social+Capital after presenting at the Launch Festival in March 2013. The company says it has "always prioritized building a real, healthy business" and makes hires "very selectively and intentionally": as of October 2026 it lists just four open roles.

Sue Khim, Co-founder and CEO. Co-founded Brilliant in 2012 after pivoting out of Alltuition, an earlier edtech startup. Her March 2013 Launch Festival presentation drew Social+Capital's investment, and she was profiled by Forbes in 2019. Studied at the University of Chicago.

The engineering problem is unusual: building interactive learning games whose every configuration must be provably correct and solvable, at the intersection of game development, pedagogy and AI. The interactives role works with Elm, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS and SVG, alongside an LLM-powered content agent and an AI tutor, and the team writes publicly about evals for AI learning games, where "almost right" answers are catastrophically wrong for learners.

Pay is published and non-negotiable by design. The Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Interactives) posting lists $180,000 to $250,000, and Brilliant runs a systematic compensation framework: yearly salary scales per vertical, levels mapped directly to scales, and "First and Best offers" with no negotiation for new hires or existing teammates, so pay reflects expected contribution rather than negotiation skill. A location adjustment of typically 5 to 10% applies outside SF and NYC. Benefits include 100% covered medical, dental and vision premiums, flexible PTO with a norm of about 6 weeks off per year including federal holidays, home office equipment and a professional development stipend.

Brilliant names four values: adventure, excellence, generosity and candor. In its own words, the team are "optimists in the face of uncertainty", take pride in the work, go the extra mile for each other and "tell it like it is (the good and the bad)". The engineering team describes itself as small, elite and AI-enabled, full of former founders, early employees and engineering leaders turned ICs, with a norm of "doing the very best work of our careers" and an emphasis on outcomes over outputs.

The company is remote-friendly but synchronous: everyone keeps core hours of 9:30am to 2:30pm Pacific regardless of timezone, about half the team lives near the SF and NYC hubs, and the whole company gets together in person about twice a year. Engineers work in small cross-functional pods with product, design and content, trusted to own implementations end to end.

Roles are posted on Brilliant's Lever board (https://jobs.lever.co/brilliant) and linked from https://brilliant.org/careers/. As of October 2026 there are four openings, all full-time and listed as "NYC, SF, Remote": Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Interactives), Future Engineer, Math Learning Designer and CS Learning Designer. The Lever postings are tagged United States, and the company's October 2026 Hacker News hiring post describes remote hiring in North America.

The interactives posting asks for at least 7 years of web-focused engineering, ideally with game development, animation or interactive media experience; Elm or other functional programming background helps but lack of a specific technology is "never disqualifying". Brilliant explicitly wants people who tinker constantly with AI tools and hold a strong point of view on AI-enabled engineering, who write code simple enough "for an intern to understand", and who can articulate what makes a favorite product delightful. Offers are first and best, with no negotiation.