Lead Engineer

About the role

Save My Exams is a rapidly growing EdTech business on the lookout for a Lead Engineer to run the engineering side of our monetisation work. We are a customer-obsessed, remote-first company that improves the lives of millions of students every year.

Every year, we help students all over the world get the best possible grades in their high-stakes exams - this year more than 30m students, teachers, and parents will use our product. We're bootstrapped and profitable, which means we invest on our own terms and don't depend on the next funding round. We like to think we're the most exciting tech company in Europe you've never heard of.

Check out our Trustpilot!

The team

You'll join our Freemium squad: the team that owns everything between a free visit and a paying member. That's the registration wall, paywalls, free trials, checkout, pricing and plan tiers, upgrade, renewals and cancellation flows, and how free users come to see the value of going premium.

It's a small team: two senior engineers, a senior product builder who covers design, and a share of our CRM manager's time, with direction set by our Chief Product Officer. You'll report to our Head of Engineering, who led this squad until recently.

The squad runs more experiments than any other team at Save My Exams. Its biggest wins came from unexpected places, and its biggest learnings came from the many tests that didn't move anything. We write every result up, good or bad, so the next test starts from what we know.

We're hiring you because we want to run more of these tests, faster, and in parallel.

The role

To love this role, here's the type of person you are:

• You've run a lot of A/B tests on sign-up, pricing or checkout funnels, and you have opinions about what moves the needle and what doesn't.
• You care deeply about quality and the experience of our students, striking the balance between optimising for business and customer goals.
• You treat experimentation as an engineering problem: throughput, interference between tests, instrumentation, and the time it takes to get a clean read.
• You're interested in using AI tools to build, review and analyse, and you've started automating parts of the experiment loop with them. You want to go much further.
• You lead by shipping. You'd expect to spend most of your time writing code, with the rest on technical direction, review and coaching.
• You thrive in a small, autonomous, cross-functional team that decides for itself what to build, and you enjoy the ambiguity, pace and opportunity that come with a relatively small company.

Your responsibilities

Over the next 12 months, you'll:

• Lead the engineering side of our Freemium experiment programme. Scope tests with the team and CPO, build tests yourself, review the rest, and keep several experiments running at once without them interfering with each other.
• Raise our experiment throughput. Make tests quicker to set up, QA across variants and clean-up. Improve our experimentation framework, which today combines Amplitude Experiment with our own client-side bucketing, including moving assignment server-side where flicker and page speed demand it.
• Push AI into the loop. We already use agents across all our processes. You'll take that further in a calculated and pragmatic way, so the team's effort goes on the tests that need judgement.
• Hold the bar on how we test. Apply and improve our experimentation standards: primary metrics that prove revenue, guardrails, sensible significance and power, a minimum of one week, no re-runs without a new hypothesis. Write up learnings so they're reused.
• Lead by example on code quality and sustainable delivery, coach the engineers in the squad, and be a thought partner to the CPO on what's worth testing next.

Requirements

• Strong professional experience developing and operating web applications across the full stack, with a TypeScript background.
• A track record of designing, running and reading many A/B tests on conversion, sign-up, pricing or checkout funnels, including the unglamorous parts: instrumentation, sample size, guardrails, honest reads of inconclusive results, and rollbacks.
• Experience at lead or senior level shaping a team's technical direction and reviewing others' work, and the judgement to delegate decisions to the people best placed to make them.
• Hands-on, daily use of AI coding tools and agents, and ideally some experience automating part of an experiment or release pipeline with them.
• Clear written communication: project docs, experiment write-ups, decisions made in Slack rather than meetings.
• User centricity and an attitude of taking responsibility for what you ship to students.
• Save My Exams is fully remote (with the option to work from our London office). You must be based within 3 hours of GMT.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with our favoured tools: Next.js, React, Express, Postgres, Stripe, Amplitude Experiment.
• Statistics for experimentation beyond the defaults: sequential testing, interference, segmentation, or experience building an experimentation platform.
• Experience with subscription pricing, plan tiering or payments.
• Line management experience. This role may grow to include line managing the squad's engineers.

Benefits

Working for a fast-growing, bootstrapped education company is a rare opportunity to build a hugely impactful and sustainable business.

Here's what we offer:

• Competitive salary, depending on experience and skills
• 36 days of annual leave, including UK bank holidays, which you can take whenever suits you
• A 4-week paid sabbatical for every 3 years you work with us, on top of your annual leave
• Share options, so everyone benefits from our success
• Annual company performance bonus
• Private medical and life insurance
• £500 annual learning and development budget, plus 3 paid learning days
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
• Company pension scheme, with the option of salary sacrifice
• Cycle to work scheme, including e-bike rental
• Equipment budget for what you need to do your job brilliantly
• Flexible working hours: our core hours are 10 to 4, and we expect everyone to be working during that time, with a break for lunch. Outside of core hours, it's up to you how you fit in the rest of your hours, as long as it works for your team.
• Remote working: we're UK based but you can work from our London office or wherever you are within +/- 3 hours of GMT
• A people-first culture: in-person get-togethers twice a year

Process

We aim for a fast and straightforward process:

1. A short phone call with our CTO
2. A take-home technical task in TypeScript and React, in two parts: a code review of an existing pull request and a small piece of code to solve an issue. It should take 2 to 4 hours and you can do it whenever suits you.
3. An interview with our Head of Engineering and one of our Freemium engineers
4. A final conversation with our CEO

All are welcome here

Save My Exams is an equal opportunities employer and we are committed to building and empowering an inclusive community within our company. Our goal is to create a workplace where everyone is treated fairly, equitably and respectfully.

Research shows that people from underrepresented groups apply only if they fully meet the criteria in a job listing. We're committed to levelling the playing field, and we encourage anyone from any background to apply even if they don't check every box on this listing.

We believe flexibility is important, and we're happy to chat about flexible and remote working. If you need any adjustments in our interview process to help set you up for success, please let us know.