[Hiring] Senior Search & AI Discoverability Engineer @Khan Academy

Role Description

Search has fundamentally changed. Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude now answer questions directly — often without the user ever clicking a link. At the same time, traditional organic search remains a major acquisition channel for Khan Academy. This role sits at the intersection of both.

As a Senior Search & AI Discoverability Engineer on the Marketing and Acquisition team, you'll own the technical foundation that determines whether Khan Academy's content gets found, indexed, cited, and recommended — by search engines and AI systems alike. You'll spec and ship technical projects. Even if you don't check every box (no one does), we encourage you to apply!

This is a 12-month contract — a full-time opportunity (benefits eligible) designed for someone eager to make meaningful contributions to high-impact education products while continuing to grow professionally.

What you'll do:

• Research and implement GEO/AEO/AIO strategies — optimizing KA's content, metadata, and page structure to appear in AI-generated responses across Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other LLM-powered surfaces.
• Conduct regular technical audits and translate findings into clearly scoped engineering projects with measurable impact.
• Build and execute on compelling business cases for product enhancements by combining knowledge of our audiences — learners, teachers, and district administrators — with deep understanding of how search and AI discovery work.
• Instrument and monitor discoverability metrics across traditional search (GSC, organic traffic) and emerging AI surfaces.
• Partner cross-functionally with Marketing teams to prioritize and sequence discoverability improvements.
• Stay current with how LLMs retrieve and cite web content, and bring new techniques back to the team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on technical SEO experience, including direct implementation (not just recommendations).
• Ability to own implementation end-to-end — reading, writing, and shipping code (Go and React preferred) to deliver SEO/GEO/AEO/AIO improvements.
• Proven ability to work independently while partnering with engineers, cross-functional teams, and leaders to scope, drive, and deliver SEO initiatives.
• Working knowledge of how AI-powered search and answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite content (GEO/AEO/AIO fundamentals).
• Proficiency with tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Semrush, and Ahrefs.
• Experience with creating actionable insights using a variety of analytics tools including Google Analytics.
• 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.
• Motivated by the Khan Academy mission “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere."

Requirements

• Nice to have: Experience at a content-heavy or edtech platform with high page counts and structured content types.
• Nice to have: Experience with international SEO.
• Nice to have: Experience using Generative AI / LLMs to build products.

Benefits

• The hourly rate for this role is $85/hour USD.
• Overtime is not anticipated and must be approved by the team in advance.