What It Takes to Be a Brilliant Engineer with Jared Silver

Jared Silver‘s first job offer came with no application, no interview, and no job posting. Just a GitHub account, a $200 laptop, and a problem he deeply cared about.

Today he leads engineering at Brilliant, an interactive STEM learning platform with over 10 million users and he regularly hires engineering talent. In this interview, he shares what got him in the door, what opens doors for engineers today, and why he thinks early-career builders have more leverage right now than they realize.

Jared’s Journey

Reach: What drew you to edtech, and how has it shaped you as a builder?

Jared: I believe improving access to quality learning is the most important problem I can help solve in my lifetime. There’s an unbelievable ripple effect when you help somebody learn something new; not only are they better off, but now they’re better equipped to help the people around them. In their work, their communities, their families, and the world. That was the thesis that drove me toward education and continues to inspire my work at Brilliant today.

Can you walk me through your career path, what led you to becoming the Director of Engineering at Brilliant?

Jared: I’ve spent my entire career focused on making learning more effective, equitable, and engaging through software. In college, I contributed to a couple of education nonprofits in my free time by finding them on GitHub, identifying code that needed tending to, and contributing without even talking to anyone on their teams. I started to build out a portfolio of work that way.

Then I got a call from one of the maintainers—actually the executive director of one of the nonprofits I was contributing to—and he said, “Hey, I don’t know who you are or why you’re contributing to our codebase for free, but we just got this grant and I can afford to hire somebody. Do you want to get paid to do it full time instead?” And I said yes. That was my first full-time job. 

Builder DNA: Craft, Care, and Mission

Reach: What does it mean to be an exceptional builder?

Jared: It’s quite hard to be among the best in the world at something, but it’s actually surprisingly straightforward to be among the best in the world at the intersection of two or three things. I don’t think I’m among the best engineers in the world, nor am I among the best educators. But the bet I’m making is that I can grow to become among the best in the world at the intersection of education and software as cross-cutting experience helps me parlay one insight into another.

In hiring, you see this. People who are really into the mission but their technical chops aren’t quite there. Or they’re very strong technically but don’t actually care whether the work leads to real impact. Both tend to be pretty ineffective. Caring equally about the why, the what, and the how—that tends to lead to outsized impact.

How do you gauge if a candidate is the right fit?

Jared: One of the first questions we ask is: tell me about a technical project you’re especially proud of, and particularly why you’re proud of it. I’m less interested in the technical details and more interested in what gives you energy.

Some people will immediately talk about scaling something to X requests per minute. Others will say, “I got this user interview feedback about a part of the product that was really bugging people. I dove deep, found other users experiencing the same thing, prototyped three different solutions and tested them.” Those are just very different types of engineers, and it tells you a lot about what this person will be motivated by.

The other question that tends to surprise people: What’s your favorite software product, and how would you improve it? It’s common in product interviews but engineers are often caught off guard. Some folks have genuinely never thought about improving the things they use every day.

There are engineers who think about outputs “here’s my ticket, I’ll do X, Y, Z.” And there are engineers who think about outcomes: “how do I understand the intent of my PM and designer, and the needs of our users and business, and encode that in what gets built?” Engineers at Brilliant think about both building the right thing and building the thing right. 

Optimizing for outcomes over outputs is increasingly the baseline expectation for software engineers.

When you think of engineers who stood out to you, what did they have in common?

Jared: Trying to reduce it to a few words: care, craft, and mission.

The folks I’ve worked with who I’ve most admired all had a deep care and curiosity around two buckets. One is the technical craft itself: How do I become the best I can be at this every day? The other is a deep care for the people you’re building for, the product, the business, and what the business needs to keep achieving its mission.

If I were to add a fourth word, it would be synthesis. How do you take what you know about the product, the users, the business, and synthesize that with your technical craft to achieve outcomes others might not have thought of? 

That’s only possible if you have both: the deep technical craft and this ongoing curiosity about what makes users and the product tick.

The Early-Career Advantage

Reach: How can early-career engineers stand out before their resume can back it?

Jared: Engineers earlier in their careers sometimes have real advantages here. They’re often closer to the demographic the product is being built for. That is a massive advantage!

It’s much easier to leverage their recent personal experiences using products like these into insights about what we should be building – insights a more senior engineer might not have.

What gets us most excited about early-career engineers is when they show they’ve done this kind of holistic product thinking, even if it’s not through formal experience. A portfolio website that isn’t simply vibe-coded, but shows visual aesthetic and product taste, whether they’ve thought through animation easing or the right typography for example. Projects with actual users. 

The projects don’t need to be massive, but they need to show that the engineer has gone through the process: talking to users, understanding problems, prototyping, rapidly iterating, getting more feedback. Ideally even selling something, which is the ultimate signal that you’ve figured out the iterative development loop of building the right thing and building the thing right. That kind of concrete evidence is what really separates folks.

There’s a lot of varying sentiment around junior engineers right now. What’s your advice for builders coming out of school?

Jared: It’s a legitimately hard time to find work. You can’t control the macroeconomic climate or big company hiring plans. But AI tooling has also created a genuine golden age for builders, and a lot of what matters is in your control: what you choose to spend time on, how you invest your energy, and the attitude you bring to the work.

There will be people who come out of this period having figured out how to make the most of the moment — how to use the tools in front of them and make their mark in a way that wouldn’t have been possible at this scale before — and there will be people who don’t.

I broke into the industry ten years ago with a $200 laptop and a GitHub account. I chose a problem space I cared deeply about and just started building. The tools are dramatically better now, and the ability to go from idea to something real — with actual users — has never been more accessible. That loop of finding a problem, prototyping a solution, getting feedback, and iterating is still the best way I know to stand out, and to show what kind of engineer you can be.

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