Lead Engineer

Save My Exams; London; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading EdTech startup is seeking a Lead Engineer to join their Acquisition Squad. In this remote-first role, you'll ship features that help millions of students, manage engineers, and contribute to a growing tech company with a passion for solving educational challenges. Competitive salary and benefits included.

Benefits

36 days annual leave

4-week paid sabbatical every 3 years

Share options

Bonus scheme

Private medical & life insurance

£500 annual learning budget

Enhanced parental leave

Pension scheme

Cycle to work scheme

Flexible working hours

Qualifications

• Strong experience developing & operating web applications with frontend & backend tech.
• Experience in managing people.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.

Responsibilities

• Ship impactful features and experiments as part of a cross-functional squad.
• Manage engineers and help them grow.
• Define technical architecture and strategy.

Skills

User centricity

Communication

Problem solving

Collaboration

Technical understanding

Tools

Git

GitHub

TypeScript

Next.js

React

Express

Postgres

Job description

Save My Exams is a rapidly growing EdTech business on the lookout for an ambitious Lead Engineer to join our Acquisition Squad. We are an exciting, customer-obsessed, remote-first startup that is improving the lives of millions of students every year.

Reaching more than 4 million users every month, all while being bootstrapped and profitable, we’re looking for an ambitious Lead Engineer to join our team and help drive further growth through our organic channels.

We like to think we are the most exciting tech company in Europe you’ve never heard of, and this role is a unique opportunity to join a profitable EdTech business at a key inflection point.We are passionate about solving challenging and meaningful problems and looking for people who care about making a real difference in the lives of students and teachers.

So, if you’re interested in joining a rapidly scaling, product-led, customer-obsessed business, and having the chance to disrupt a $7tn+ market by improving the lives of millions of students every year, then read on.

Check out our Trustpilot!

The Role

To love this role, here’s the type of person you are:

• You’d enjoy shipping features and products that directly help millions of students across the world.
• You have an experiment-first mindset, wanting to ship quickly and learn quickly.
• You’re at home working across the whole stack, from creating delightful frontend experiences to improving our testing and deployment pipeline.
• You thrive in small, cross functional teams, working in close collaboration with other Engineers, Product Managers and Designers.
• You enjoy working in a relatively small company, and the ambiguity, pace and opportunity that comes along with it.
• You are excited to help other engineers grow in their roles; both through directly managing them as well as setting a helpful and positive example in the wider team

Your Responsibilities:

Over the next 12 months, you’ll:

• Ship and own impactful features and experiments as part of a cross functional product squad to drive organic traffic, SEO and user growth.
• Manage at least one engineer, helping them to grow and learn.
• Work closely with the other engineering leads to define the technical architecture and strategy.
• Improve our existing codebase to fix any issues and keep it in line with best practices and new technologies.
• Understand our business, our students, and our content, allowing you to use your judgement to make autonomous decisions.
• Collaborate across teams to identify, prioritise and solve problems iteratively.
• Play an active role in our code review process, reviewing code from your team and others, and making it easy for others to review the code you write.
• Write and maintain tests throughout our codebases.

• Strong professional experience developing and operating web applications using a mix of frontend and backend technologies.
• Experience managing people.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• User centricity and an attitude of taking responsibility for the product and code you ship to our students.
• An understanding – and balanced opinions – of non-functional requirements including accessibility, performance, testing, usability and security.
• Experience with Git and GitHub.

Nice to-haves:

• Experience working with our favoured tools: TypeScript, Next.js, React, Express, Postgres.
• Experience with search engine optimisation (SEO), eg programmatic pages, front-end performance, best practices.
• Experience designing and running experiments.
• Experience developing CI / CD and deployment pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, AWS / Google Cloud, Jest).

Working for a fast-growing, bootstrapped education company is a rare opportunity to build a hugely impactful and sustainable business.

Our positions are challenging, but also come with amazing advantages and opportunities.

Here’s what we offer:

• Competitive annual salary of £90,000 to £110,000 depending on experience & skills
• 36 days of annual leave, this includes the UK bank holidays but you can take them whenever suits you
• A 4-week paid sabbatical for every 3 years you work with SME (this is in addition to your annual holiday allowance)
• In addition to your salary, we also offer Share Options, so everyone can benefit from our success
• Bonus scheme
• Private medical & life insurance
• £500 annual learning & development budget
• Enhanced maternity & paternity leave
• Company pension scheme, with the option to opt into the salary sacrifice scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Equipment budget for equipment you might need to do your job brilliantly
• Flexible working hours: We don’t expect (or want) you to spend every waking hour at work. Our general working hours are 9-6pm, however we have a company-wide principle around Core Hours, which is 10-4pm and you can work at times that suit you and your team
• Remote working: we’re UK based but you can work from your home or wherever you want.
• A people-first culture - we’re driven to work hard but we also have fun, with weekly virtual fitness classes and whole company coffee coolers, as well as bi-annual quarterly get-togethers in person.

Process

Here’s an overview of our hiring process, so that you know what to expect. We aim for a fast and straight-forward process.

• First interview with an Engineering Manager
• A take home code task with a focus on code review, this should take up to four hours
• A second interview with our CTO
• 15 minute chat with the CEO

All Are Welcome Here

Save My Exams is an equal opportunities employer and we are committed to building and empowering an inclusive community within our company.

Our goal is to create a workplace where everyone is treated fairly, equitably and respectfully.

Research shows that underrepresented groups apply only if they fully meet the criteria in a job listing. Save My Exams is committed to leveling the playing field, and we encourage anyone from any background to apply even if they don’t check every box on our job listing.

We believe flexibility is important, and we’re happy to chat to you about flexible and remote working. And, If you need any flexibility or adjustments in our interview process - to help set you up for success - then please let us know too.