Senior Software Developer (node.js)
Oak National Academy is a new organisation, set up in April 2020, founded on the vision that every child should have fair access to a high quality education.
To support our growth, we are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our product and engineering team.
Oak is a small but growing organisation where everyone plays an active role in shaping the culture and direction and where engineers work closely with educational experts to make a meaningful difference to children’s education.
What you’ll be doing
Engineers at Oak have a range of specialisms and interests covering databases, serverless computing, GraphQL, React and component-led UI. We work together in product squads alongside designers, researchers and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements to give teachers and their pupils quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.
Responsibilities
Manage the backend processes that underpin Oak's web applications, including: Postgres database, GraphQL API, CMS, and event-driven content ingest processes
Use your experience of building web apps and APIs with Node.js and SQL to lead a small team of less experienced engineers to maintain, improve and extend these processes
Take responsibility to ensure all backend processes are covered by a trustworthy suite of automated tests
Use your judgement and experience of cloud infrastructure to pro-actively propose and implement improvements and replacements that enhance the maturity, security, maintainability and scalability of our infrastructure
Help us to increase the monitoring and observability of our backend processes to ensure high availability and performance
Take a pro-active, lead role in ensuring the platform is available and fully functional at all times, including taking part in our on-call incident response team to ensure the platform remains available at all times
Work with content owners outside the product and engineering team to ensure that they have the tools they need to fully create, manage and deploy their content
Work in cross-functional and product orientated squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required
Deputise for the Head of Engineering and take on other general responsibilities as required
As a member of the Oak Team, contribute to the planning and culture of the organisation
Manage an Engineering project budget
Skills and experience
5+ years building highly scalable web applications using Node.js and SQL databases
Familiarity building GraphQL APIs, including writing custom resolvers
Comfortable working with cloud technologies such as Serverless functions and Docker containers
Confident managing cloud infrastructure and setting up continuous integration and deployment processes
Comfortable modelling data using a variety of storage approaches including relational databases
Experience working with event driven processes
Experience working in education and/or education technology is desirable, but not required
We work with Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare tools including Cloud Build, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL and Cloudflare Workers. Experience with any of these tools is helpful but not essential.
If this sounds like what you’d love to be doing, we can’t wait to hear from you. If you’re not sure that you exactly fit the above criteria, get in touch anyway. Ability and attitude is just as important as experience!
What we offer
Work at home or wherever you prefer (with option to use a desk in a shared office space in London)
25 days holiday + bank holidays + 5 days additional Office Closure Leave
11% unmatched employer pension contributions
A fair, transparent pay and reward structure
Flexible working in terms of the hours you work across the week
Your own computer and a budget for a home working setup to support healthy working
Learning and development budget with allowances for learning time during the working week
About Oak
- Oak was set up rapidly in response to school closures caused by the Covid pandemic
- For the 2020/21 school year we launched over 10,000 online lessons in 28 subjects covering the entire national curriculum for pupils aged 4-16
- Between April 2020 and July 2021, 130 million lessons were taken on our platform and we averaged 2.5 million pupils a week using our lessons between January and March 2021
- Well over 1,500 years of video lessons have been watched by pupils on Oak
Job closes on 24th February at 23:59pm.