Software Engineer, Ruby on Rails, Third Space Learning (EdTech startup) £70-85k - remote

Overview

Since our inception in 2013, Third Space Learning have been supporting teachers by delivering online one-to-one maths tuition as part of the school timetable. We have worked with hundreds of UK primary schools, thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of pupils, delivering over 700,000 hours of online tuition.

We are a team of teachers, parents and technologists, based in London and Sri Lanka, who all understand both the emotional and academic value of one-to-one tuition across all social groups.

Mission

We want every student to be able to access great quality online tuition to help them succeed in, and love, their learning.

Current Snapshot

TSL are currently a team of 50 in London, and over 300 across India and Sri Lanka. We’re growing quickly —doubling revenue last year to £3m —and we’ve raised £7.5m in funding to scale our business. We’re also a major partner in the UK Government funded National Tutoring Programme, which supplies online catch-up tutoring for children who’ve been disadvantaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tech Stack we use:

• Backend: Ruby on Rails, SideKiq, WebRTC (Janus), Elixir
• Frontend: JavaScript, React, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Next.js, SASS, jQuery, Cypress
• Cloud/DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, DataDog, Papertrail

Your Role

As a Software Engineer you will report to the CTO, working closely with product, UX and the engineering to design and develop brand new full stack features across our suite of applications. You will also:

• Work alongside our other Senior Engineers, ensuring technical decisions and approach are consistent.
• Take the lead on key full stack features / projects, owning them end to end.
• Support and mentoring more junior team members.

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen a large increase in weekly tutoring sessions which has created challenges for our internal operational processes. In March 2021 we doubled our previous record for weekly tutoring sessions reaching 19,000 sessions in a week, by the end of the year we expect to be closer to 30,000 sessions a week. This has put strain on our internal processes which are largely manual. A key focus for engineering is building better tools and features to support our internal workflows.

About You

• You deeply empathise with our mission and the social impact of the product. Understanding the value of data to our business and the opportunity it has to improve education interests and excites you.
• You take a holistic approach to your work, you understand how data serves the needs of our users, business and product. You enjoy helping different people get access to the data and insights they need to perform their jobs better.
• You are a true team player, with solid experience of improving the quality of data in an agile, fast-paced environment.
• You are a doer, who’ll get stuck in and make things happen.
• You enjoy solving difficult problems, but you are pragmatic and you understand the need for trade-offs depending on the current needs of the business and product.
• You know how to analyse problems with data, and you love to experiment and prototype based on customer feedback.

What we'd like to see:

• Experience with multiple web applications and APIs written in Ruby on Rails
• Some experience building full stack features using React and JavaScript
• Designed and built reliable cloud-native services with AWS (or another cloud provider)
• Ensuring high quality through unit and integration tests
• Happy to work in an agile development process.

Nice to haves

• Worked with Kubernetes and understand how to build services that are optimised for Kubernetes deployments.
• You’ve worked in the Education sector.

Career progression:

The next step will be either moving into a Team Lead or Tech Lead position depending on your preferences.

Package and Benefits

• Salary: £70,000 - £85,000
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Flexible working arrangements (time and location)
• Personal development budget and Perkbox
• Spacious office
• Vitality healthcare with
  • 50% off Virgin Gym
  • Bi-weekly free cinema tickets
  • Free weekly coffee at Starbucks
• Pension contribution (statutory)
• Budget for self-learning and training
• Lovely location, team, and regular good times

Interview Process

Two stage interview process completed within two weeks.

Please note:

• We are able to offer visa sponsorship.
• Although fully remote, we can only consider UK based candidates