Senior Software Engineer

Job Description

Senior Software Engineer

Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Flexible working | Competitive salary + excellent benefits

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

We’re looking for a Senior Software 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 high-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

You’ll join our AI-Enablement team to build and improve the digital platforms that teachers and pupils rely on every day. Working closely with product managers, designers, researchers, and curriculum specialists, you will develop user-facing applications with AI features utilising technologies such as TypeScript and Next.js. You’ll also interact with our backend systems using PostgreSQL databases and GraphQL APIs. You'll stay ahead of the curve in AI developments across the industry and gain hands-on experience building user-facing AI tools in production.

This is a hands-on role with plenty of scope for technical leadership and mentoring, alongside the opportunity to shape our engineering practices and culture. You'll be part of a supportive and collaborative team that cares deeply about accessibility, usability, and delivering tools that genuinely enhance learning.

🔧 What You’ll Be Doing

• Development of highly-responsive, accessible web-based AI features

• Designing and writing clean, well-tested code that’s easy to maintain and scale

• Be the expert authority within the engineering team on several important aspects of the code base and maintain a good working knowledge of large parts of the technology stack

• Championing new tools or practices that improve the developer experience

• Supporting and mentoring colleagues across the team

• Taking part in our on-call rota to help keep our products reliable and available

• Collaborating with others across the organisation in multi-disciplinary squads

• Contributing to planning, retros, and the wider culture of Oak

🌱 What We’re Looking For

• Proven professional experience building AI features with TypeScript and React frameworks (ideally Next.js)

• An understanding of how generative AI works and the ability to balance experimentation on new tools and techniques with building production-ready AI features

• Experience working on cross-functional product teams in agile environments

• Experience building automated test suites and understanding the value of different types of testing (e.g. unit vs integration)

• Desire to build beautiful, easy-to-use digital products with an understanding of the importance of accessibility in all its forms

• Strong collaboration and communication skills

• Comfortable working independently in a remote setup, managing your time and relationships effectively

• A proactive, growth-oriented mindset and a desire to help others thrive

💛 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

  The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute in all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable working at pace, with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones as required), and you will continuously look at ways that the team can keep getting better. You will excel at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively.

🌈 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.

We use the Applied recruitment platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. 

📌 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: We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

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 some questions related to your day-to-day job. After the advert closes, your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans).

If you are shortlisted, we’ll invite you to the next stage, which will consist of a remote technical interview and a technical pairing session conducted over Zoom. This will last approximately two hours.

We love giving feedback, so at the end of the application process, we'll share our assessment of your performance.

We are aiming to start interviews in January 2026.

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, then please get your application in early 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 gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.