Full-Time
Engineering Manager
Posted on 10/31/2025
Prolific
1,001-5,000 employees
Platform matching researchers with study participants
No salary listed
Remote in UK
Remote
 Engineering Management (3) |
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- Proven Leadership: Extensive experience in engineering management and a demonstrable track record of technical leadership that inspires and delivers.
- Strategic Problem Solver: Exceptional problem-solving acumen coupled with strategic thinking.
- Clear Communicator: Outstanding interpersonal and communication skills, with a proven ability to lead diverse teams, influence stakeholders, and collaborate effectively across all levels.
- Technical Depth: 5+ years of professional software development experience, including hands-on expertise building highly available, transactional, and distributed cloud-based applications (e.g., e-commerce platforms, marketplaces, or SaaS solutions).
- Passion for People Development: A genuine passion for developing others, with significant experience in managing, motivating, coaching, and mentoring high-performing individuals and teams.
- Bridge Builder: Fluency in translating complex technical solutions and their feasibility into clear, compelling narratives for non-technical stakeholders.
- Lead with Impact: Take full accountability for leading, coaching, and empowering one or more engineering teams to consistently deliver outstanding customer value.
- Develop and Grow Talent: Be a coach and mentor, actively nurturing the professional growth of your engineers, including impactful hiring, onboarding, performance management, and supporting career advancement.
- Unblock and Accelerate: Champion a healthy and predictable pace of work by proactively planning, removing blockers, orchestrating dependencies, and fostering crystal-clear communication within and beyond your team.
- Strategic Partnership: Collaborate closely with product managers and your team to define both what to build and how to build it to ensure consistent and high impact pace
- Technical Leadership: With your team, drive the technical solution design and implementation, ensuring alignment with the overarching technical direction
- Sustainable Innovation: Collaborate closely with product managers and the team to manage technical debt and toil and provide support for existing systems. Implement and maintain standards for creating secure, high-performance, observable, and well tested code that ensures long-term reliability.
- Cultivate Excellence: Foster a powerful ownership culture characterised by DevOps practices, continuous improvement, innovation, and operational excellence
- Shape the Future: As a key member of the engineering leadership team, you will significantly contribute to defining and evolving Prolific's engineering practices, from our collaborative ways of working to our architectural direction.
Prolific operates an online research platform that connects researchers with a global pool of vetted participants. Researchers post studies and set demographic criteria to recruit eligible participants, who complete surveys and other research tasks to earn compensation. The platform uses a reputation-based system to ensure data quality from both researchers and participants. Clients include academic institutions, businesses, and individual researchers, making Prolific a centralized marketplace for human data in online research. The business model charges researchers a commission for each study conducted on the platform, covering participant recruitment, study management, and platform upkeep. Overall, Prolific aims to provide a reliable, efficient way to collect high-quality data for research and market insights.
Company Size
1,001-5,000
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$33.3M
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Founded
2014
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- AI training demand surge drives growth as companies require reliable human data for model development and testing.
- Custom screening automation and participant allowlists reduce researcher friction and increase platform stickiness.
- Series A funding enables geographic expansion and product development to capture emerging markets beyond academia.
What critics are saying
- Scale AI and MTurk's cost advantage erodes market share in price-sensitive AI training and annotation segments.
- EU AI Act enforcement starting August 2026 imposes strict compliance costs and participant data audit requirements.
- Fraud rings exploiting screener systems damage researcher trust and inflate participant rejection rates significantly.
What makes Prolific unique
- Prolific's reputation-based system and 120,000 vetted participants ensure higher data quality than competitors like MTurk.
- Advanced screener logic with AND/OR conditions enables precise participant targeting for complex research requirements.
- Established relationships with Google, Stanford, Oxford, and European Commission provide credibility and recurring revenue.
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Benefits
Remote Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↓ -10%1 year growth
↓ -11%2 year growth
↓ -13%SMART-Photonics, a pure-play foundry for Indium Phosphide photonics semiconductors, has raised €100 million in debt-financing round from Rabobank, Innovation Industries, Government of the Netherlands, ASML, Brabant Development, VDL Groep, KPN Ventures, PhotonDelta and NXP Semiconductors.
Prolific, a London, UK-based provider of a platform that matches AI developers with engaged and verified people, raised £25M in funding.
London-based startup Prolific has raised $32 million to further develop its unique system that uses a network of 120,000 human participants to train and stress-test AI models.
Prolific, a company that was founded to source verified data from human participants, said today that it has raised $32 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Partech and Oxford Science …
AI, when it works well, can feel like magic, but all too often AI-based systems don’t work as they should: If the data used to train models is not deep, wide and reliable enough, any kind of curveball can send that AI in the wrong direction. A London startup called Prolific has built a system it believes can help head off that issue, by tapping a network of 120,000 human participants to inform and stress test AI models. And in a sign of demand for its services, Prolific has now raised some funding — £25 million ($32 million) — to expand its operations.The round was co-led by Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE).Prolific was founded in 2014 and already counts organizations like Google, Stanford University, the University of Oxford, King’s College London and the European Commission among its customers, using its network of participants to test new products, train AI systems in areas like eye tracking and determine whether their human-facing AI applications are working as their creators want them to. Up to now, it’s been revenue from users like these that have helped Prolific grow. In fact, the only money Prolific had raised prior to this round was a seed round of $1.4 million it got after going through YC. (Yes, it was profitable; no longer now that it’s taking VC money and investing in growth.)“We’ve seen incredible traction recently, and have a huge opportunity in front of us so are taking on this new funding to supercharge our efforts and expand our product, and range of participants, much faster than we could have without it,” Phelim Bradley, the founder and CEO, said over email to TechCrunch.The company was conceived initially not out of a specific need in the world of AI, but out of a general problem that researchers often face with panels for anything, something Bradley identified in his own academic work (his background, before Prolific, was in computational biology and physics).In short, it’s a challenge to find comprehensive cross sections of people to respond to questions, and nearly impossible to do so in a timely manner