Senior Software Engineer Remote
Job description
Senior Software Engineer | Up to £60,000 | Remote but able to meet occasionally at either Plymouth, London or Bristol | Permanent, full-time
We’re looking for an experienced software engineer to drive the transition of our stack from monolith to microservice; whilst continuing to add value for our members and make a real impact on the education sector.
The company
The Key is the leading provider of support for schools and academy trusts, relied upon by over half of all schools in England. Our whole school approach gives leaders one trusted source to turn to for any challenge, equipping them with highly accurate, expertly synthesised and context-rich resources, guidance and CPD. As part of a wider group of software companies all focused on the education sector, we’re firm believers that great software can make a real impact on the education of children across the country.
The role
As a Senior Software Engineer at The Key you will join our small, yet empowered Engineering Team.
You are more than capable of managing your own projects, keeping internal stakeholders informed throughout the delivery process; whilst identifying solutions to business and technical problems, building out scalable and maintainable solutions.
You will
- Own and deliver iterative solutions across the stack
- Create short feedback loops with internal stakeholders
- Be a major driving force with our migration to microservices
- Further raise the bar on standards and best practices in the team
The ideal person
- 5+ years of commercial development experience, preferably TypeScript (although deep JavaScript experience works too)
- Real hands on experience working in a microservices architecture (even better if you were part of the migration from monolith)
- Is comfortable coding on the frontend (JavaScript) even if it’s not where you spend most your day
- Fantastic communication skills; we are empowered engineers who manage our own projects as well as write code
- Critical thinking, attention to detail, thinking outside the box…we work very hard to stay out of the feature factory mindset
Our tech stack
We are in the early stages of migrating a handful of Python Django monolith apps to a microservices architecture built on top of Node, TypeScript, GraphQL and gRPC with detached TypeScript frontends.
- 3 x CMS’s built on Python Django and Wagtail
- Data exposed via a number of Django REST Framework endpoints
- Partial migration to a detached frontend (Vue.js Nuxt SSR & React Next.js)
- Partial migration to microservices exposed via a GraphQL Gateway (Python/Node gRPC and GraphQL)
- A Flutter native app
- Reasonable level of code coverage from tests but definitely more we can be doing here
- Codified deployments to Google Cloud Platform (Kubernetes)
- Continuous Integration server and pipeline (Github Actions)
Why work for us
We place huge importance on caring for and developing our people. If you join us you can expect a good work-life balance and the training and support you need to succeed in your role and continue to progress. We are a socially conscious company, but one that also likes to have fun.
We offer:
- A generous holiday allowance (25 days in your first year and 28 days from your second)
- The option to buy and sell holidays as well as additional ‘Key Days’ throughout the year
- A very generous family policy for both maternity and paternity leave (up to 20 weeks and 6 weeks at full pay respectively)
- Free access to a financial wellbeing app, Bippit
- Free access to an EAP and counselling service, Health Assured
- A multitude of other benefits to support our employees…
We're serious about flexibility….
Are you an early bird who is done by midday or perhaps one who needs a little more time in the morning to get into gear? Ever been up at 3am just having to fix that bit of code…we have!!
As such, we have fully embraced this and offer true flexi-time; providing you work your total contracted hours per week you can work whatever time of the day you feel most productive, the only condition is full attendance at all non optional meetings p.s. we do not time track, we trust our engineers and will only withdraw flexi-time where we see the need to address performance or communication issues
Location
The Engineering Team is fully remote; this is a remote role. We aim to meet up at least 4 times a year in person for team building and a bit of social, which will normally be somewhere in the South of England.
Should you want a bit more office life in your week we do have multiple offices across the country where you could spend more in person time with other teams across the group of companies. These are currently in Plymouth, Bristol, Norwich, London, Leeds and Lincoln.
How to apply
The deadline for applications is on 17th April at 6pm.
We are an equal opportunities employer. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments to be made at any step of the recruitment process, including telephone/video interviews, written tasks and face-to-face interviews.
Our application form includes questions around diversity and equity. Data related to racial and ethnic origin, health and sexual orientation are processed for equal opportunities monitoring. We process and store this data in accordance with our data protection policy. All sections are optional and candidates will not be penalised for not filling in these fields.
