Join our team as a developer, building a new platform helping schools to improve outcomes for pupils by understanding the experience and engagement of their teachers.

The Opportunity

We use technology to make a difference to the lives of tens of thousands of children across the country. The ImpactEd platform is used by teachers and education organisations to assess the impact of support provided to young people in order to spend more time doing what works – and less of what doesn’t. Our platform has been built from the ground up by a small technology team over the last three years. We are now growing this team to welcome a full-stack developer who is drawn to our mission for social change. We are open to a range of backgrounds and seniorities: we will have mentoring opportunities from our team for earlier or mid-career developers.

Over the next year we will be launching the Teacher Engagement Platform (TEP): a research-based tool to better understand teacher engagement in school settings. The full-stack developer role would initially work within our existing codebase to support school leaders in understanding the experience of their staff and the factors influencing their engagement. Following this period, TEP is likely to become more independent as a platform, providing school leaders with a validated survey question set, benchmarks to national averages, and live reporting. This platform will be built in-house, and the successful candidate would take a lead on TEP’s development. As such, there is an opportunity to benefit from working in an established codebase and team, while having the scope associated with establishing a new product.

This would be an ideal opportunity for a software developer who is keenly interested in solving user problems and wants to work across the full lifecycle of a product, both technical and non-technical. Our programming language is Ruby but you do not need Ruby experience to apply.

Platform Development

Most of your time you will be writing well-tested code, using Ruby (Rails) and front-end technologies to deliver features and fix bugs. We organise our workflow currently around Trello cards and GitHub pull requests, and you’ll work in our team of developers to build, test and deploy. You will need to be someone that can thrive operating with a significant amount of autonomy while also pair programming and collaborating. As well as building features, you will be reviewing code and having your own code reviewed – and we would want you to help us in maintaining a strong peer review technical culture.

Product Planning

You will spend some of your time planning and prioritising, working with colleagues on sprint prioritisation, balancing fixes, features and addressing technical debt. You will be expected to help support the long-term technical vision for TEP, so you will need to engage in planning and estimation as well as active development. You will also welcome contributing to changes in processes, tools and development workflow as the team and platform grows.

Problem Solving

You will spend some of your time responding to bug reports (both automated exceptions and human reports) to work out what might have gone wrong and what we can do about it. Beyond technical responsibilities, you will also play an active role in our wider organisation, for instance through contributing to strategy and working culture, or supporting professional development.

About You

Full stack for us means both code (e.g. backend, data modelling, server generated views, following style guides) and working across the entire product lifecycle (e.g. building and defining features, bug fixes, improving code quality, testing). You don’t need to have expertise in absolutely all areas, but we’re looking for someone that is motivated by working across that breadth and is keen to both work with an established code base and have the opportunity to work on the development of a new platform. Tools you would be using include Heroku, AWS, Google Cloud, Typeform, Appsignal, Circle CI, Postgres, Ruby/Rails/Rspec, Sidekiq, Redis, Javascript (webpacker and StimulusJS) and HTML/CSS.

Essential experience would be:

• Experience building, deploying and maintaining robust web applications.
• We imagine that most applicants will have 2+ years relevant experience, but we’re more interested in your skills than where they came from
• Experience making technical decisions and summarising trade-offs
• Confidence using automated test/build/integration/deployment techniques
• Willing to work across front-end and back-end

As well as technical requirements, we are looking for people who:

• Communicate clearly, understanding the knack of conveying complex ideas in an easy to understand way
• Learning and feedback oriented, intellectually curious, and keen to develop their skillset
• Product-focused, prioritising how features add value rather than just meeting requirements

An interest in education or the social enterprise / tech for good context would be a bonus.

Why Us?

As an organisation we care deeply about creating a meaningful place to work and supporting people to grow personally and professionally. These are reflected in our organisational values, which outline the distinctive working culture we are looking to create. In particular, these values are reflected in our commitment to:

• Agile and flexible working: responsive management, flexible hours, hybrid or fully remote working
• Personal excellence: we invest significantly in professional development, including an external mentor for every staff member, an individual CPD budget, and formal and informal training and support
• Transparency and ownership: we have an open culture that ensures all staff guide our strategic direction
• Mental health and wellbeing: access to health and wellbeing advice and free therapist support

Diversity and inclusion at ImpactEd

As a growing organisation we are committed to:

• Becoming increasingly representative of the sector and geographies that we operate in
• Providing a positive experience of work as part of an inclusive culture led by our organisational values
• Maintaining an annual EDI action plan - led by the internal team and supported by a Board sponsor

What to expect from the recruitment process:

• All applications are anonymised until the point of interview
• We use a recruitment system, Applied, which debiases the recruitment process
• We implement a standardised interview template and competencies matrix and use external interview panellists

Summary

Job Title

Full Stack Developer

Reports To

Head of Operations and Product

Salary

£45,786-56,725 (role level H1-H6). dependent on experience, plus flexible benefits allowance, £2,000 London office usage uplift if applicable and annual employee ownership award (equity or cash) subject to organisational performance. Details on pay and benefits available in FAQs on our careers page.

Contract

Permanent, full-time or part-time but likely with a minimum commitment of c. 4 days per week, although we are open to discussing flexible working options.

Hours

We offer flexible hours with 10-4 as core hours. A full working week is 37.5 hours.

Benefits

Flexible working; regular training; individual professional development budget and leave allowance;dedicated external mentor; significant growth potential.

Based

Hybrid / flexible. We have a central London office but our team work from across the country and we are happy to support predominantly remote or office-based working.

Start Date

As soon as possible