Full Stack Engineer

Department: Product and Technology

Location: Home based, UK 

Reports to: Technology Team Lead

Hours: 37.5 per week

Salary: (Depending on experience)
PLEASE NOTE: Due to the festive period our response to applications may be slightly slower than usual. We will endeavour to respond to everyone by mid January 2025. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Role Overview
We are currently undergoing rapid growth and are therefore looking for a talented engineer to join our team.
This is an exciting role as we are a small, fast-paced team working on a interesting product! Our system is made of multiple APIs and data pipelines processing data extracted from code written by students and their learning journey going through videos, coding projects and quizzes as well as interacting with tutors and their peers. Technology-wise we use Python, Postgres, Redis, Vue.js, Docker, Kubernetes and GCP products a lot.

Our engineering team is developing EDUKATE.AI, the learning platform used by learners across all organisations and universities we work with. 

The platform is key to our success and can be seen as an ecosystem with three components:

• A hosted development environment allowing subject matter experts from the industry and academia to develop interactive content on cutting-edge technologies
• The learning platform itself, hosting our structured programmes and optimised for our learners to pick up new skills quickly by solving problems in a simulated professional environment and receiving instant personalised feedback.
• A delivery dashboard for our team of tutors, coaches and admins to support large cohorts of students

We always seek to improve all three aspects of our system - making it easier for experts to build advanced educational content and deliver the best learner experience with automated feedback on code, recommended readings, cloud-based development environment and peer-learning features. To do so our platform brings together research in software engineering, source code analysis, education pedagogy and AI. 

Key responsibilities:

• Collaborate with a small, fast-paced team to develop an innovative Data & AI education platform
• Design, build, and maintain multiple APIs and data pipelines
• Work on backend systems that handle data from the learner’s journey through the content
• Develop front-end features and user interfaces using Vue.js for a seamless user experience
• Write efficient SQL queries to create, read, update, and delete data in PostgreSQL, ensuring data accuracy and optimised performance
• Leverage Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services to support scalable and reliable infrastructure
• Diagnose and resolve bugs, responding to support tickets promptly to maintain platform reliability and customer satisfaction
• Project work, gathering requirements and scoping to support other functions within the business

 Candidate Specification: Essential

• Experience with a Python web framework (Flask, Django, etc..)
• Experience using various products from a cloud provider (GCP or equivalent)
• Experience with software development tools and processes (version control, CI/CD, DevOps, etc...)
• Experience with HTML, CSS and a Javascript framework (Vue.js, React, or equivalent)
• Experience with SQL (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite or equivalent)

Desirable

Frontend and UX/UI:

• Experience with Frontend testing frameworks
• Experience with Cypress integration test framework
• Experience in UX/UI, responsive and accessible UIs

Backend and Infrastructure

• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience with Docker
• Experience building applications at scale: infrastructure, profiling, monitoring, performance, database indexing

Miscellaneous

• Familiarity with the Python Data Science stack (Pandas, Sklearn, Numpy, etc..)
• Experience working with Learning Management Systems (LMS)
• Interest in education / EdTech

Company Benefits: 

• Remote first company providing flexibility to work from home
• Pension with up to 5% matched contributions
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• EAP with 24 hour confidential support line

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 

Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.