Product Engineer (Remote - US CT/ET)

Zen Educate Inc.; Chicago, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zen Educate Inc. is seeking a Product Engineer to help scale our education staffing platform in the US. You’ll join a small but mighty team, with 25 Product Engineers working in small dynamic squads across the product.

You’ll build relationships quickly, own problems end-to-end, and help grow a US hub in Chicago while collaborating with teams on the West Coast and Europe. Remote work in CT/ET timezones is supported.

Job description

Product Engineer

High level stuff you might be filtering against

Location: Remote (CT/ET Timezone). Collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe, alongside building out a new hub in Chicago.

Type: Full-time

Salary: Location dependent. As a guide, our current range across all levels is $130k-$190k. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.

What I am looking for

Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate and I’m looking for engineers who can make an impact on the real world problem of education staffing, and do it through engineering excellence.

Every place has its own understanding of what engineering excellence looks like (sometimes written down, sometimes not). Here’s what it means to me and Zen:

• Valuing real world outcomes and shared learning over output
• Product thinking over pure tech - start with the problem, ship quickly and iterate.
• Team success and sustainability over individual heroics.

We are a small, but mighty team and so every engineer has the opportunity to make an outsized impact and put their stamp on what excellence looks like in practice. What do I mean by “small”? Today we have 25 Product Engineers working in small dynamic teams across the Zen product.

We recognise the world is not static - “what got us here, won’t get us there” - so we look for curiosity, adaptability and proactiveness as fundamental traits. The engineers I see be the most successful are those who focus on solving problems, look to help others and just happen to typically leverage technology to do so.

This role is particularly exciting because you’ll be one of Zen’s first Product Engineers in the US, where we’re enjoying rapid growth. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re someone who can build relationships quickly, take ownership of problems end-to-end and help grow a team around you

What we are building and why

Getting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a crucial problem to solve, both for education outcomes for children and for the sustainability of an industry that spends billions on this.

Today the platform we are building supports internal operations teams on filling roles, educators on finding roles via our mobile app and schools on getting educators in for both short-term and long-term roles. The more we develop the platform (and the ability to self-serve in the marketplace), the more efficient the whole process becomes, which means more money going back to educators and into classrooms (over $65 million globally since 2017).

We are well established in the UK and growing at a phenomenal rate in the US.

What we need now is to reach the next level in how we build our platform to support this growth. That’s where you come in

What the role looks like in practice

I've written a bunch of words above that I hope capture your interest and excitement. But what really matters is what reality looks like and the best people to share that are the existing engineers on the team. So here are a few glimpses from your potential peers of some of what they have done in a week:

• “I picked up an AI teacher qualification project that started out quite loosely defined, with no clear owner or scope. I spent time aligning with Product and Ops to clarify what problem we were solving, shaped an initial approach, and started delivering iterative improvements so we could test value quickly. Along the way I helped reset direction when momentum dipped.” - Arindam
• \"I spent the week working on a major overhaul of our permissions system — moving away from hardcoded roles towards something granular and scoped per school, network, and unit. I also wired up audit logging around sensitive actions so we have proper traceability in production, and built out an admin UI so non-engineers can manage roles and permissions without needing to come to us.\" - João
• “I spent the week creating a foundational agents.md configuration for our monorepo to help us use AI more effectively when building product and writing code. I worked alongside the AI working group to support some of the bottlenecks we’ve been seeing in our development process, and made the setup clear and practical so other engineers could start using it straight away.” - Eimi
• “I implemented backend and frontend MixPanel events for crucial workflows to better understand how users interact with our product and what we can improve on.” - Georgi
• “I spent the week upgrading our React Native app to the latest Expo SDK. This meant updating dependencies, fixing compatibility issues, and resolving build and runtime problems to keep everything stable. The upgrade puts us on a supported version, reduces future maintenance risk, and gives us access to new tools that will help us ship features faster.” - Ethan
• “I spent time this week improving the anonymisation logic in Ditto - our internal tool for cloning production databases safely for development. I also put together the weekly DevEx metrics for the Product and Tech team, covering things like CI pass rates and deployment frequency. Then towards the end of the week I did some work addressing minor vulnerabilities that were found from our monthly red-teaming with CovertSwarm.” - Jai

What you might like or dislike

Every place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them. Note that some of these are recent changes in our approach and may be “work in progress” when you join.

How We Work

Boring tech for the obvious, experimentation for the rest. Our core is Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, running on Heroku + Cloudflare etc. But we have also evaluated Amazon Personalise as a candidate for our matching system and spiked out our own AI powered knowledge-base as well as investigating AI for bug triaging.

Process serves performance.

We work in a Mission-based setup where teams form around outcomes not org charts, unnecessary process or following rules. That means you won't be stuck in a lane - you'll work across different parts of the business based on your strengths and interests. Greater performance gives greater freedom - think “Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that and just play.”

Engineers as problem shapers (not ticket takers).

You’ll thrive here if you want to shape problems, not just deliver tickets. Our Product Managers and Designers are partners you pull on for leverage rather than task givers who hide the users away. And we’ll encourage you to propose (and lead) Missions that propel the business forward.

Daily shipping culture.

We ship regularly and want to get even better at it. We are investing in this and welcome those who’ll help us start smaller and iterate faster.

Growth & Progression

Choose your own career path. We care more about impact and learning than rigid competency grids. This means greater flexibility in what progression looks like, but requires you to build an understanding of what we value from guiding principles and shared real-world examples.

Your manager is a partner, not a supervisor.

You’ll have a manager, but they won't be directing your every move. Expect them to help you think through hard problems, offer perspective, and provide nudges to help you grow - not to tell you what to do or check your work. That means you'll need to take ownership of your own progress and speak up when you need unblocking.

Few Titles, infinite Levels.

We use Levels instead of Titles to show growth in a Role. You won’t see titles like Associate, Senior, or Staff here. Instead, you can grow continuously by getting better at your current role - e.g. working faster, safer, and more independently. Changing roles is possible too, but depends on business needs, since different roles aim for different business outcomes and typically use different skills.

Investment over reward as a mindset.

Level changes