Platform Engineer
Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Salary: £71,043 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension
Do your best work, for the right reasons.
We’re looking for an experienced Platform Engineer to help us build beautifully simple, high-impact digital products that support teachers and improve outcomes for pupils across the UK.
Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.
Our culture has been independently recognised through:
Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)
Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact
Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback
💡 About the Role
We've built a lot, fast. Now we want to make it last.
As a young organisation, we've used modern technology to move quickly and get remarkable products into teachers' hands. We've proven what's possible. Now we're maturing, making sure the foundations are as strong as what's built on top of them. We see this role as central to that change.
You'll work with engineering, product, and research colleagues to build confidence in using observability principles that deepen our understanding of how teachers and pupils use our products, and help us keep improving them. We work in product squads alongside designers, researchers, and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements so teachers and pupils get quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.
Alongside other members of the platform engineering group, you'll enable squads to move more quickly by optimising tooling and implementing automations, including the effective and safe use of AI. You'll drive the creation and adoption of engineering standards across code, deployment, security, observability, and monitoring. And you'll be a key driver of automation, working with the rest of the platform team to improve the overall developer experience.
You'll need a good understanding of platform engineering in a SaaS-heavy environment and the value it brings to an organisation. A solid grounding in development practices, security fundamentals, and infrastructure operation matters. But specific technical skills are less important to us than a passion for automation, an ability to understand complex systems, and a pragmatic engineering approach.
As part of the Oak team, you'll contribute to the wider success and culture of the organisation, and support and role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.
💡What you'll be doing:
Leading continuous improvement of the observability, performance, and reliability of our web applications (Next.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node) and serverless functions (Google Cloud Functions, Cloudflare), deployed on Vercel and Cloudflare
Identifying and implementing automation to speed up development, secure systems or improve service quality.
Helping teams maintain high service quality by promoting a culture of quality across engineering and product, and enabling squads to use SLOs and SLAs effectively
Contributing to the strategy and evolution of our monitoring, logging, and reporting solutions so developers can resolve problems quickly and get meaningful insights into application behaviour
Identifying and implementing automations that speed up development, improve security, or raise the quality of what we deliver
Working in cross-functional, product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation
Deputising for other members of the platform team and taking on broader responsibilities as needed
🌱 What we're looking for
You'll have strong professional experience working with event-driven architectures using serverless technologies such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Azure Serverless.
Beyond that, you'll bring:
3+ years experience leading the continuous improvement of cloud-based platform services, including event-driven and serverless architectures.
Demonstrable experience collaboratively designing and implementing observability, monitoring, and reporting solutions for complex cloud infrastructures in a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including solutions for squad-specific use cases
Confidence reading and maintaining web application code, with the ability to design and build small apps, preferably in JavaScript or TypeScript
Experience with cloud computing platforms and a working familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools
A collaborative approach, comfortable promoting and leading collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and able to frame work in terms of impact.
The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute across all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable moving quickly and with agility, and be confident working with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones, as required). You will continually look for ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively
📖 See how we work
Want to know more about how we build our products? Our Engineering Substack shares how we build AI and data tools for education, including the decisions, trade-offs and lessons we've learned along the way. Read Oak's Engineering Substack - https://engineering.thenational.academy/
💛 Our Benefits
25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)
Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year
11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)
A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off
Fully remote working — we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred
Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun
A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust
🌈 Inclusion and Belonging
We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors.
If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.
We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.
📌 Key Info
Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here
Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time
Closing date: Sunday, 29 November 2026
If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.
Next steps
You'll answer a few admin questions followed by some questions about your day-to-day work. Answers are anonymised, randomised, and reviewed by a panel, so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.
If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.
Interview dates:
1st stage technical assessment interview: w/c 7 December 2026
2nd stage culture focus interview: w/c 14 December 2026
If this sounds like somewhere you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.
We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, don't leave it too long to avoid missing out.
We are an equal opportunities employer.
We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.
