Backend Engineer

Inspiring Teachers; Remote; GBP 40,000 - 50,000; Full time

Job summary

A nonprofit education organization based in Birmingham seeks a proactive backend developer to enhance its technical capabilities. You will lead the redesign of its data replication system and contribute to critical developments while mentoring other engineers. The role emphasizes a mission-driven work environment with a focus on improving educational outcomes through technology. Ideal candidates should possess experience in TypeScript, AWS, and collaborative practices within a distributed team. Competitive salary and remote work offered.

Benefits

Competitive salary for non-profit

Opportunities to travel to Africa

Mission-driven environment

Qualifications

• Experience with backend technology and data replication systems.
• Excited about working in a fast-paced non-profit environment.
• Ability to mentor other engineers through code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Lead implementation of a data replication system.
• Contribute to the modularization of the platform.
• Establish key performance metrics and create dashboards.
• Drive the technical direction of backend architecture.
• Identify infrastructure bottlenecks and operational challenges.
• Write well-tested code and mentor other engineers.

Skills

Experience with testing frameworks like Jest

Affinity for working in EdTech

Ability to collaborate effectively with a distributed team

Proactive and self-starter

Tools

TypeScript

AWS

MySQL

React-Native

Node.js

Job description

THE OPPORTUNITY

Inspiring Teachers is an evidence-driven nonprofit working to expand access to quality education. We are building tools for managing large-scale foundational learning programs in Sub‑Saharan Africa. Our approach enhances structured pedagogy with technology to enable data‑driven teacher support that improves learning outcomes. Today we have programs in Ghana, Uganda and Malawi, but over the next decade our ambition is to provide tools that improve outcomes for millions of children.

Join a growing, ambitious Product Team at Inspiring Teachers, which currently consists of 6 members working remotely across African, EU and US timezones, and is responsible for the development of an offline‑first mobile app for teachers, school leaders and field staff, and a management dashboard for field staff and district managers.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

You will help build the foundation that supports the organisation’s technical goals. You will be expected to be proactive and collaborative, helping deliver high‑quality backend technology, contributing solutions to features ranging from efficient data replication to multi‑tenancy, and scaling to support the Organisation’s mission.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Take a leading implementation role in re‑designing our data replication system to guarantee data consistency, minimise latency, and improve fault tolerance.
• Contribute your expertise to the modularisation of our platform, helping the team transition to an architecture that supports multi‑tenancy and future growth.
• Establish key performance metrics and create dashboards to measure the impact of partial diffing on network latency, server load, and client‑side rendering time, demonstrating the value of the optimisation.
• Help drive the technical direction of our backend architecture while balancing trade‑offs between development speed and system maintainability.
• Identify and address infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling issues, and operational challenges as our field staff uses our software in their day‑to‑day operations.
• Write exemplary, well‑tested code that serves as a model for the team. Mentor other engineers through constructive code reviews and pair programming, elevating the team's overall code quality.

IS THIS YOU?

• You have an affinity for working in EdTech and for social impact
• You have experience with testing frameworks like Jest and building reliable systems
• You’re excited about working in a fast‑paced and dynamic non‑profit environment.
• You’re a team player with the ability to collaborate effectively with a distributed team.
• You’re a self‑starter who takes initiative and drives projects to completion.

TECH STACK

• Main programming language: TypeScript
• Infrastructure: AWS (Serverless, CDK), Netlify
• Database: MySQL (looking into PostgreSQL/CouchDB/RxJS)
• Front‑end: React‑Native, Next.js
• Back‑end: Hono.js, Node.js (Lambda)
• Design: Figma
• Monorepo (pnpm, Turborepo)
• Slack (async communication) & GitHub (for source control and management)

BENEFITS

• Competitive salary for non‑profit
• Remote with opportunities to travel to Africa
• Claude Max plan
• Mission‑driven environment

We know role descriptions can sometimes feel long or intimidating, and great people may rule themselves out. If you think you could be a good fit for Inspiring Teachers, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out, tell us a bit about yourself, and explore whether this opportunity could be right for you.