Full Stack Developer (Senior) - remote

ImpactEd is an award-winning, non-profit, social enterprise that exists to help evaluate, understand and improve impact in education.

In the education system, we invest huge amounts of time, money and energy in different programmes and interventions to improve outcomes for pupils. Yet far too often, we don’t know what is working – and what isn’t. We exist to address this evaluation deficit, helping schools and those working with them to better understand how they can make a difference to the lives of young people. We do this through a combination of hands-on partnership, training and consultancy, and our digital platform which makes monitoring and evaluation quicker, easier and more effective. 

Since being founded in 2017, we have grown rapidly. In 2018, we won the Teach First Innovation Award;in 2019, our work was profiled by the Department for Education;and last year we won the Fair Education Alliance’s Scaling Award to support our growth. We now reach over 60,000 young people annually and have launched a new partnership with Big Change to reach our vision of system-wide change. Our small and growing team is a mix of former teachers, academic researchers and software developers committed to maximising social impact.

The opportunity

We use technology to make a difference to the lives of tens of thousands of children across the country. The ImpactEd platform is used by teachers and education organisations to assess the impact of support provided to young people in order to spend more time doing what works – and less of what doesn’t.  

Our Ruby on Rails platform has been built from the ground up by a small technology team over the last two years. We are now looking to grow this team to welcome a senior full-stack developer who is drawn to our mission for social change and excited by the idea of having technical ownership and responsibility across all aspects of the stack. You would be joining a dynamic social enterprise with opportunities for significant development in line with organisational growth. 

This would be an ideal opportunity for an experienced software developer who is keenly interested in solving user problems and wants to work across the full lifecycle of a product, both technical and non-technical. Day to day, you would be working with one other full-time developer (Sarah Knight) and you’d be supported by our incoming Head of Operations and Product and the Managing Director (Owen Carter). As part of a small team, you will also work with our delivery staff and have as much first-hand interaction with users as you would like.

We are looking for significant experience building, deploying and maintaining robust web applications, ideally in Ruby on Rails. Most of your work will be using back-end technologies but you’ll also need to be happy working in front-end as needed. In particular we’d look for you to have: experience of systems architecture;ability to provide overall technical direction;confidence with automated testing and TDD;and a clear communication style, including to non-technical staff.

Full stack for us means both code (Rails backend, data modelling, server generated views, following visual style guides) and working across the entire product lifecycle (building and defining features, bug fixes, improving code quality, testing, deployment, documentation of systems and processes). We’re looking for someone that is motivated by working across that breadth and keen to develop their skillset to do so.

Beyond technical requirements, we are also looking for people that can communicate clearly, are learning and feedback oriented, and think product-first, prioritising how features add value rather than just meeting requirements. 

Why us?

The application deadline is 1st March 2021 at 9am. Please note that we will review applications regularly as they come in, so early applications are strongly encouraged.

For further details and to apply: see the full job description at https://impacted.org.uk/careers