Three Reasons to Work at Quizizz

I joined Quizizz a couple of weeks ago and wrote about it here. I have also been working closely with the team over the last few months. In this post, I want to talk about our vision and mission, plans for building the tech organization, and a sneak peek into what to expect if you choose to work with us.

What’s Quizizz?

We are on a mission to motivate every learner on the planet.

Teachers in the United States get an hour a day outside classroom time for preparation. You can imagine it’s probably worse in India given the difference in population and class sizes. Teachers barely have any time to consider new teaching methodologies to rethink their instructions and learn modern practices (ex: incorporating games, flipped classrooms, etc.,) to make classroom learning more effective. Students are bored in their classes and end up supplementing with tuition / after-school classes. While other EdTech companies are trying to solve this problem using async learning, tuition, and sharing extra content, we at Quizizz are on a mission to empower our teachers to use their classroom time more effectively using technology and modern pedagogy involving gameplay flipped classrooms and interactive content.

Quizizz is a platform that has been empowering teachers to motivate and engage learners around the globe. We started out by building products to gamify and make different types of assessments engaging and fun. We have grown to 75M monthly active users and 2B responses recorded every month in the last year. These games take up the first and last 10 mins of a typical class. We have the remaining 40 mins in a classroom that is ripe for innovation. Building on this foundation, we are on the journey to becoming the preferred OS for every teacher to create and deliver engaging content, irrespective of the mode of learning.

We always talk about students being at the center of a triangle of stakeholders — teachers, parents, and peers. So far, we have had success in exploring the link between the teacher and the student via classroom content, gameplay, assessments, and homework. Not only are we planning to go deeper in exploring the student-teacher link, but we also intend to go broader in exploring the other 2 links.

So what will it take to achieve this mission?

Building a World-Class Technology Team

We have gotten to this scale with a nimble team of 20. As we continue to grow, we will preserve the small team culture. Having a direct channel with users and speed will be our biggest moat. We don’t want the bureaucracy of big companies. We want to be able to delight our teachers and students at speed. To fulfill our ambitions for growing the business, we will hire not only some of the best engineers across the board from Infrastructure, Data, ML, Distributed Systems, Frontend, and Mobile but product managers and designers.

At the end of the day, we can guarantee this — there will always be more problems to solve than people. The idea is to relentlessly prioritize building the most impactful products and platforms, eliminate bureaucracy, and create opportunities for everyone to learn, lead, and experience exponential growth in their careers. To that end, we organize ourselves as small, autonomous, decentralized, and mission-oriented teams with high levels of ownership and accountability. Reducing the number of decision-makers is the only way we can move fast. Read more about how we organize ourselves here.

What challenges can You expect as an engineer?

We have the scale of users that every engineer craves. Our real-time experiences can support 3K concurrent users in a session and we have 500K active connections across all sessions on our servers. You can imagine the number of broadcasts per second, and the optimizations required in packaging data and rendering. A flavor of some of the challenges you can expect are –

• Geographically distributed scale that will require us to build multi-datacenter infrastructure, storage technologies optimized for different workloads, and streaming technologies to power real-time experiences
• We have collected massive amounts of data over the last five years, which enables us to now launch products that require solving deep technical problems in Machine Learning (ML) (discovery, recommendations, personalization, etc.,).
• Modern Frontend platforms will require scaling the number of concurrent users for our real-time interactive experiences. For comparison, most frontends scale horizontally (ex: Google search, Facebook newsfeed, etc.,), but at Quizizz, we need to scale both horizontally and vertically.

This is a non-exhaustive list of technologies used to build our products. Most engineers on our team used these technologies for the first time in their careers at Quizizz. More than having a knowledge of these technologies, willingness to learn has helped us build with an eye toward the future.

What is Our Culture like?

Tim Ferris once defined culture as — “what happens when people are left to their own devices.” As part of my onboarding over the last few weeks, I’ve done ~35 1:1s and thought I’d ask people what they like about working at Quizizz. It was heartwarming to hear people talk about what they inherently feel rather than perks like freebies, free food, snacks, etc., (which by the way, we have!). I’ll list a few responses verbatim –

We will continue to stay true to these values. We want to bring people that are excited by working alongside peers like the above. Staying true to our product, our focus is on creating an environment where everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow in their careers. To that end, we expect our team members to learn and adapt themselves. People who thrive here don’t expect to be micromanaged. As someone famously said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”.

If you love taking higher levels of ownership, are comfortable with things not being defined to the T, and have an endless curiosity to learn, relearn and unlearn, then this is the place for you. We will provide you with problems, a bit of chaos, and lots of opportunities, (Chaos creates opportunity!) and empower you to make some truly magical strides in defining the future of Edtech.

Does this sound like you? If so, apply directly here. Our jobs page is a work in progress, so please pardon the appearance. If you don’t see yourself fit the descriptions, but are excited to contribute to our mission, hit me up at Sandeep [at] quizizz [dot] com. We are hiring for frontend, backend, mobile, and data roles.

We are building a global platform from India. More than one in two schools in the US use Quizizz. We’re rapidly growing in South East Asia and India. It is a rare opportunity to build a global product from the ground up with a brand as loved as ours.

Thanks to Haripriya for editing and Vijaya for the beautiful illustrations!