Product Engineer

Product Engineer at Zen Educate

At Zen Educate, we're looking for an experienced Product Engineer to make a significant impact on the real-world challenge of education staffing through engineering excellence. This role is remote, generally aligning with UK timezone ±6 hours, and offers a full-time position.

As a reference, our current salary range in the UK for all levels is £75k to £110k. We encourage applicants from other locations to map this to their equivalent market rate.

What Zen Educate is Looking For

👋 Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate. I'm seeking engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems in education staffing with engineering excellence. Our philosophy emphasizes valuing real-world outcomes, shared learning over output, and product thinking over pure tech. We believe in starting with the problem, shipping quickly, and iterating, always prioritizing team success and sustainability over individual heroics.

Our small but mighty team of 25 Product Engineers offers every individual the opportunity to make an outsized impact. We seek curious, adaptable, and proactive individuals who focus on problem-solving, helping others, and leveraging technology to achieve these goals. Whether your passion lies in building great products, scaling systems, or improving team processes, you will thrive here if you care deeply about users, focus on tangible outcomes, pursue continuous learning, and strive to elevate those around you.

What We Are Building And Why

Ensuring the right teacher is in the right school at the right time is a critical problem, impacting children's education outcomes and the sustainability of an industry that spends billions. Our platform supports internal operations in filling roles, educators in finding roles via our mobile app, and schools in securing staff for both short-term and long-term positions.

By developing our platform and enabling greater self-service in the marketplace, we increase efficiency, directing more funds back to educators and classrooms—over £50 million since 2017. We are well-established in the UK and experiencing phenomenal growth in the US. Your role will be crucial in helping us evolve our platform to support this next level of growth.

What The Role Looks Like In Practice

Our Product Engineers actively engage in diverse and impactful projects. Here are some recent examples from your potential peers:

• Shaping loosely defined projects, aligning with Product and Operations, and delivering iterative improvements.
• Overhauling core systems like permissions, moving to granular, scoped controls, and implementing audit logging and admin UIs.
• Creating foundational configurations for monorepos to leverage AI effectively in product development and code writing.
• Implementing backend and frontend MixPanel events to gain insights into user interactions and identify areas for improvement.
• Upgrading critical applications, such as a React Native app to the latest Expo SDK, resolving compatibility issues and reducing maintenance risk.
• Improving internal tools for database anonymization, generating DevEx metrics, and addressing minor security vulnerabilities.

How We Work

We leverage boring tech for the obvious, experimentation for the rest. Our core stack includes Ruby on Rails, React, and React Native, running on Heroku and Cloudflare. However, we also explore innovative solutions like Amazon Personalize for our matching system and AI for bug triaging and knowledge bases.

Process serves performance in our Mission-based setup, where teams form around outcomes. You'll work across different business areas based on your strengths and interests, free from rigid lanes or unnecessary processes. We empower engineers as problem shapers, not ticket takers, partnering with Product Managers and Designers to drive business forward. We foster a daily shipping culture, constantly striving to deliver value faster through smaller, iterative releases.

Growth & Progression

We believe in a