Lead Software Engineer (Platform)

We think an ideal fit for this role would be an experienced senior or lead software engineer who likes moving at speed, seeing the impact of their work, and thrives in an environment of high ownership and autonomy. Your time will be mostly dedicated to planning and building software, rather than people or project management, although you will be interacting regularly with people in other parts of the business to understand their problems and help come up with solutions.

Youll be the only person working full time on the application codebase, but strong engineering practices are core to our company culture, and you would not be working in isolation. You can expect daily standups, regular planning meetings and our production code all goes through PR review with the CTO or one of the Curriculum Team (who are all senior software data engineers).

What you can expect to work on

• Designing and building system architecture in the cloud (previous projects have included custom online environments for learners to write and run code, a websocket > sse proxy to get around firewalls that block websocket traffic, and a system to manage allocation of AWS accounts to learners so they are available for their sessions).
• Planning and developing new app features, (e.g. allowing breakout video conferencing groups within our coaching sessions, liveshared drawing whiteboards, smartscheduling). Youll be given a lot of trust to make decisions, but with the support of the CTO
• Improving our build, testing and deployment processes.
• Fixing bugs, improving app performance etc.
• Collaborating with our CTO on the engineering side of our product roadmap, helping to define requirements and come up with creative solutions to business problems.
• Whilst the company is small, we’d also love you to be involved in the development of our teaching material if this interests you. This could be coming up with interesting and realistic code exercises demo apps, writing clear explanations, or even leading some workshops depending on your skills and preferences.

• Requirements

  Essential

  We think its unlikely that the right candidate for this role wont meet these requirements:

  • 5+ years of experience building, maintaining and securing web applications, with at least some work on infrastructure, databases, backend and frontend.
  • 3+ years (and a high level of comfort) working with Ruby on Rails in a commercial team.
  • Experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure (ideally using AWS and Terraform).
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills (fluent English).
  • Comfort in a fast moving environment, where priorities can sometimes change quickly ideally in a startup or scaleup.

  • For the most part, we expect youll be able to fill knowledge gaps with specific tools, as long as youve had relevant experience. So dont worry if youve used GCP more than AWS, or CloudFormation instead of Terraform wed expect your understanding of the concepts to enable you to learn quickly.

    However, we feel that Rails is quite specific, and therefore a hard requirement since most of our backend code is written in Rails and we need you to be able to hit the ground running.

    Nice to have

    • Experience owning the performance, monitoring and security side of web services.
    • Interest in helping others to learn, such as mentoring developers at work.
    • Familiarity with React and TypeScript.
    • Comfort working with Terraform, Docker and AWS.
    • Experience using multiple additional programming languages.
    • Deep expertise in any other popular technologies.

    • Benefits

      • £80,000110,000 FTE salary, depending on background.
      • Equity options in a growing, and profitable company.
      • Enhanced parental leave.
      • MacBook Pro provided.
      • Up to £1000 to help setup and improve your home office.
      • Fully remote work, forever.
      • Kind and collaborative company culture.
      • 25 days holiday + public holidays, with flexible work options.
      • Be a key part of growing our company, providing a valuable service you wish youd had access to in your career.
      • Make a huge impact in helping to build and shape the product, team and culture as we grow.
      • Learn something new every week: working across the whole stack, and helping review our evolving teaching content, you’ll be exposed to new technologies all the time.