Engineering at Course Hero

Always learning is one of our core values.

We’re in the business of helping people learn and thrive. Andrew Grauer, co-founder and CEO of Course Hero, was a student at Cornell University and knew how hard it was to find study help that was specific to his classes. He determined there had to be a better way to leverage technology to learn, study efficiently, and do well in school. Thus, Course Hero was born. Course Hero is on a mission to help students graduate confident and prepared.

Fast forward several years, our online learning platform offers over 100 million course-specific study resources contributed by and for a community of students and educators, as well as 24/7 tutor help.

We know that life is multifaceted, and like our students, we aim to help our employees be confident and thrive both inside and outside of work. With the help of our yearly $5,000 educational assistance and tuition reimbursement programs, employees have the opportunity to take continuing education classes and programs in their field. The stipend can be used to pursue additional degrees like an MBA or even certifications that will improve the overall value the employee brings to the team. The stipend can also cover fees for industry conferences where employees can learn from tech leaders and bring insights back to their teams. Last but not least, we organize hackathon events throughout the year to empower teams to innovate and explore new approaches to technologies. Many of our successful product features have stemmed from hackathon projects!

It’s safe to say we are a group of passionate and curious problem solvers who believe in the importance of learning and are excited to help improve the student learning journey every day. If the idea of growing your career with a purpose-driven company piques your interest, let’s chat.

We believe that flexibility is essential.

While we have three main office hubs located in Redwood City, CA, Vancouver, BC, and Toronto, ON, most employees work from home within a 50-mile radius. Teams decide the cadence for in-person collaboration, brainstorming, and culture-building. We've been getting together recently for events like food truck parties, drive-in movie nights, and even office game nights.

Our typical working hours are between 9:30am and 5:30pm PT. Every other week we have “no meeting Wednesdays” and offer a $500 work from home stipend, plus a $200 per month home tech stipend. Every week, one meal is on us, and every month, we deliver new snacks straight to your door.

We value our time both inside and outside of work.

We try to create a culture that encourages a healthy balance between work and life, as well as well-being and personal growth. In addition to PTO (15 days for the first year and 20 beginning your second year), we also offer 12 paid company holidays and 10 sick days. For folks who have been with us for five years, we offer a one-month paid sabbatical. Some team members used their sabbatical to spend more time with family, travel across the globe, or take additional classes to further their own personal development.

We provide holistic wellness, health, family planning, and leave benefits like our $2,000 annual wellness stipend, 8 hours of paid volunteer time off per quarter, and dollar-for-dollar donation matching (up to $1,000) to a charity of your choice, annually.

We are on a mission to be the go-to learning platform for every course.

We envision a world where every student graduates confident and prepared. Our mission is to be the go-to learning destination for every course. One of our values is to be “customer focused”; focus on the user, and all else will follow. We believe it wholeheartedly and carry it throughout user research, design, product development, and engineering, as well as cross-functional collaborations. We prioritize our customers and solve their greatest study needs with an exceptional experience.

For instance, on certain projects, our User Experience Researchers (UXRs) talk to dozens of students about their life goals and pain points, and observe their daily and weekly coursework routines. Combined with the knowledge from learning experts and other online studying tools, we get a good understanding of what students desire and how Course Hero can close any gaps. The UXRs also conduct a comprehensive survey, polling both our active student users and the general student population. With the help of a sophisticated and thorough cluster analysis, we were able to identify several basic student study needs and look at how they change over the course of a semester. In the next steps, everyone in the company must work together to come up with ideas, design, build, and test new product solutions. All of our new product solutions are tested over and over again with real, active, and potential users to make sure that the features are useful, easy to use, and help our current and future users do well.

Parents are a big part of Course Hero – 30% to be exact!

Parents are fans of our virtual-first work environment (bye bye commute), family planning and leave benefits, and a culture that allows both work and family to be prioritized. We offer 16 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents and a $10K family planning stipend. Most of our socially-distanced in-person events are family-friendly, like our Halloween costume contests, trunk or treats, kite flying, arts and crafts, and kid-friendly movie events.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of flexibility and caring for our team. Learn more about how we supported our Course Hero parents at the beginning of the pandemic.

This is a big part of why people like working at Course Hero.

We want you to grow your career with us. Engineers are encouraged to grow in their roles both vertically and laterally. With the help of our educational assistance and tuition reimbursement programs, employees have the opportunity to take certification classes and programs to continue learning in their field. Additionally, teams are able to shadow cross-functional departments (like Design and Product) and see the future path of taking their next internal job at Course Hero.

Internal mobility at Course Hero goes beyond upward mobility. We believe that growth and development can take shape in multiple forms, where employees can grow their careers by taking on new roles as leaders or as high-performing individual contributors. For example, a previous VP of Engineering took on a new role as a Mobile Engineer. While most of his career was spent as a Platform Engineer, he wanted to learn new skills, coding for mobile, and he felt that he didn’t get as much hands-on experience in his executive leadership role. This was fully embraced and celebrated, as we are life-long learners at Course Hero.

Errors give us valuable insight to improve user experience.

Effective error handling is important both for the developer and the user. We try to make sure both internal and external error messages make sense from a user’s point of view (human-friendly output please!). And in the case of internal errors, they should always be actionable, communicating what was expected versus what was received. To track runtime errors we use Rollbar, which fires Slack notifications once an error exceeds a pre-set threshold. You can’t fix what you can’t see, so it’s crucial to have visibility to the exceptions that are occurring in order to maintain a great user experience.

We’ve also increasingly leaned into using tests to make sure our front ends pass muster; we use React Testing Library for testing individual React components and Cypress for testing application flows (and legacy non-React code). We also leverage compilers like TypeScript to reduce both runtime errors and the number of unit tests we need to write.

Two of our company values are “always learning” and “responsible.” We maintain a strong desire to know more in order to better ourselves and Course Hero, never letting a fear of failure get in the way of learning and progress. We each take smart, strategic risks and are accountable for our successes and failures. We take pride in making progress and enabling those around us to do the same. While mistakes are inevitable, we view them as learning opportunities. When something goes wrong it may sting in the moment, but it ultimately yields valuable insight to improve our customer’s experience and save us from future stress.

We optimize for velocity and impact.

While there are some shared guardrails and baselines, every team has the freedom to define their own working style and meeting cadence. Most teams operate on a biweekly sprint cadence, and push code to production multiple times a day. Individual teams define their own estimation. We also have a technical bootcamp to onboard them onto our technical stack and set them to build and push code to production. The goal for the first month is to set engineers up for long-term success, so experimentation and asking a lot of questions are highly encouraged!

Engineers frequently collaborate via impromptu Slack Huddles and Zoom sessions; while there's no official mandate for pair-programming, it tends to happen organically through these collaborations. The Engineering Manager or Lead Engineer for each team acts as a Scrum Master, and partners with product owners. Testing is an internal priority, and we focus on unit tests, with mandated code-coverage thresholds which run as part of each build during our continuous integration pipeline, and end-to-end integration tests with Cypress to simulate user-flows. Regularly paying down tech debt is also part of our production process. In fact, one month we dedicated two days in a row to paying it down.

We generally favor having multiple, small autonomous product pods, each empowered to make their own decisions to execute on their own roadmaps and drive their key metrics. This streamlined structure allows us to continuously iterate in parallel and move quickly to deliver value to our customers. To ensure cohesion across these pods, we have cross-functional platform teams that enforce technical consistency and provide a common underlying base for individual pods to build upon.