Senior Software Engineer

Department: Technology
Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office)
Reports to: Engineering Manager
Hours: 37.5 per week
Salary: Depending on experience

Role Overview

This is a significant new role. We are building a product engineering capability that did not previously exist at Cambridge Spark: engineers who own business outcomes, not just feature backlogs, and who work directly with stakeholders to understand problems rather than waiting for specifications to arrive.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be an early member of a new Engineering Pod: these are small, autonomous teams responsible for the quality, usability, and impact of EDUKATE.ai for the people learning through it and the teams supporting them. You will work across the full stack, from understanding what your pod’s stakeholders actually need, through to shipping and iterating on the solutions you help shape. You will be a multiplier for the engineers around you: raising the bar on how the team thinks about problems, not just how it solves them.

This role reports to one of our Engineering Managers, and you will initially join our Employer Experience pod. You will carry seniority in a team that we're deliberately rebuilding around product ownership and outcome focus.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery within your pod: from discovery and problem framing through to production, iteration, and outcome measurement
• Work directly with internal stakeholders — curriculum, operations, delivery — to understand problems at their root, not just their surface symptoms
• Shape solutions collaboratively: contribute to proposals, decision records, and discovery conversations, not just pull requests
• Bring an AI-first approach to your work: use AI tooling actively in prototyping, agentic coding, and accelerating delivery — and help the wider team develop the same habits
• Hold a high engineering standard across your pod: TDD, code review discipline, and a genuine commitment to quality are non-negotiable here
• Coach and support less experienced engineers in your pod, sharing your experience of what good looks like
• Contribute to the evolution of our engineering practices as the pod model matures

Candidate Specification

Technical

• Full-stack capability, or a strong skew in one direction with genuine competence in the other — we are not hiring pure specialists
• Comfort owning the full delivery lifecycle: solution design, production, and iteration
• Strong engineering fundamentals: test-driven development, code review culture, and a demonstrable commitment to quality
• Active engagement with AI-assisted development: prototyping, agentic coding, and using AI tooling as an accelerant rather than a novelty
• Experience with EdTech, regulated industries, or other complex domains is a plus; the ability to absorb a new domain quickly is essential
• Nice-to-have:
  • Professional experience in our stack (Python / React / Vue) is a bonus, but not essential
  • Proven experience building, deploying, and maintaining AI systems in a production environment — you have taken AI capabilities beyond prototypes to reliable, monitored production services that real users depend on

Stakeholder and Communication

• Strong written communication: you can write a clear proposal, a concise technical decision record, or a stakeholder update that lands without needing translation
• Comfortable contributing to discovery conversations, not just delivering code once the brief is written

Ways of Working

• Outcome ownership over feature delivery. You question whether the proposed solution is the right one, not just whether you can build it.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. Small pods mean limited process overhead. You make good decisions with incomplete information and know when to escalate versus when to proceed.
• AI-first mindset. You are not just curious about AI; you actively use it, prototype with it, and bring that practice into the team around you.
• Collaboration without ego. You care about the outcome more than the credit. You build trust through competence and consistency, not volume.
• Communicative. You surface problems early, document your thinking, and keep stakeholders appropriately informed without being prompted.

What This Role Is Not

• It is not a ticket-completion role: if you want a well-defined backlog and a clear brief every sprint, this probably is not the right fit
• It is not a people management role: you will not have direct reports, though you will be a senior presence in your pod and expected to act like one
• It is not a big-company environment: we are a bootstrapped edtech business; you will need to be comfortable with resource constraints and a degree of ambiguity about what comes next

Why This Role

• A genuine opportunity to influence how product engineering works at Cambridge Spark, not just execute a predetermined roadmap
• Direct access to and influence with senior leadership, including the Head of Engineering
• Work that matters: our platform supports thousands of learners across data and AI apprenticeships, and the quality of what you build has a real and traceable impact on their experience and careers
• An AI-serious engineering culture: we are an AI company and expect our engineering practice to reflect that, including giving you time and space to experiment
• A stable, values-driven business with a social impact mission in education and skills

Company Benefits: 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 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 alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

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. 

Our 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.