Location: Remote (CT/ET Timezone). Collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe, alongside building out a new hub in Chicago.Type: Full-timeSalary: Location dependent. As a guide, our current range across all levels is $130k-$190k. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.What I am looking for👋 Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer at Zen Educate and I’m looking for engineers who can make an impact on the real world problem of education staffing, and do it through engineering excellence.Every place has its own understanding of what engineering excellence looks like (sometimes written down, sometimes not). Here’s what it means to me and Zen:Valuing real world outcomes and shared learning over outputProduct thinking over pure tech - start with the problem, ship quickly and iterate.Team success and sustainability over individual heroics.We are a small, but mighty team and so every engineer has the opportunity to make an outsized impact and put their stamp on what excellence looks like in practice.Today we have 25 Product Engineers working in small dynamic teams across the Zen product.We recognise the world is not static - “what got us here, won’t get us there” - so we look for curiosity, adaptability and proactiveness as fundamental traits.This role is particularly exciting because you’ll be one of Zen’s first Product Engineers in the US, where we’re enjoying rapid growth. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re someone who can build relationships quickly, take ownership of problems end-to-end and help grow a team around you 💪What we are building and whyGetting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a crucial problem to solve, both for education outcomes for children and for the sustainability of an industry that spends billions on this.Today the platform we are building supports internal operations teams on filling roles, educators on finding roles via our mobile app and schools on getting educators in for both short-term and long-term roles.We are well established in the UK and growing at a phenomenal rate in the US 🚀What we need now is to reach the next level in how we build our platform to support this growth. That’s where you come in 😉What the role looks like in practice“I picked up an AI teacher qualification project that started out quite loosely defined, with no clear owner or scope. I spent time aligning with Product and Ops to clarify what problem we were solving, shaped an initial approach, and started delivering iterative improvements so we could test value quickly. Along the way I helped reset direction when momentum dipped.” - Arindam“I spent the week working on a major overhaul of our permissions system — moving away from hardcoded roles towards something granular and scoped per school, network, and unit. I also wired up audit logging around sensitive actions so we have proper traceability in production, and built out an admin UI so non-engineers can manage roles and permissions without needing to come to us.” - João“I spent the week creating a foundational agents.md configuration for our monorepo to help us use AI more effectively when building product and writing code. I worked alongside the AI working group to support some of the bottlenecks we’ve been seeing in our development process, and made the setup clear and practical so other engineers could start using it straight away.” - Eimi“I implemented backend and frontend MixPanel events for crucial workflows to better understand how users interact with our product and what we can improve on." - Georgi“I spent the week upgrading our React Native app to the latest Expo SDK. This meant updating dependencies, fixing compatibility issues, and resolving build and runtime problems to keep everything stable. The upgrade puts us on a supported version, reduces future maintenance risk, and gives us access to new tools that will help us ship features faster.”- Ethan“I spent time this week improving the anonymisation logic in Ditto - our internal tool for cloning production databases safely for development. I also put together the weekly DevEx metrics for the Product and Tech team, covering things like CI pass rates and deployment frequency. Then towards the end of the week I did some work addressing minor vulnerabilities that were found from our monthly red-teaming with CovertSwarm.” - JaiWhat you might like or dislikeEvery place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey ⚖️. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you.💻 How We WorkBoring tech for the obvious, experimentation for the rest. Our core is Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, running on Heroku + Cloudflare etc. But we have also evaluated Amazon Personalise as a candidate for our matching system and spiked out our own AI powered knowledge-base as well as investigating AI for bug triaging.Process serves performance. We work in a Mission-based setup where teams form around outcomes not org charts, unnecessary process or following rules. That means you won't be stuck in a lane - you'll work across different parts of the business based on your strengths and interests.Engineers as problem shapers (not ticket takers). You’ll thrive here if you want to shape problems, not just deliver tickets. Our Product Managers and Designers are partners you pull on for leverage rather than task givers who hide the users away.Daily shipping culture. We ship regularly and want to get even better at it. We are investing in this and welcome those who’ll help us start smaller and iterate faster.🌱 Growth & ProgressionChoose your own career path. We care more about impact and learning than rigid competency grids.Your manager is a partner, not a supervisor. You'll have a manager, but they won't be directing your every move.Few Titles, infinite Levels. We use Levels instead of Titles to show growth in a Role.Investment over reward as a mindset. Level changes are tightly coupled to compensation changes.💸 CompensationMarket reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that’s not just where you live).Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).Think long term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn’t the right time to join us.🤝 Team Culture & CollaborationDistributed engineering team. Solid communication skills and async habits are key to be effective.We believe in impact and measurable outcomes, alongside shared learning.Balanced, sustainable work. Long hours are not a badge of honour - they are an indication something isn’t working well. We value a sustainable pace and healthy teams.Diversity is good in some ways and lacking in others.How we hireHire fast, fix fast. Hiring today is...not great, with most companies being too cautious and taking too long to make a decision 😦. We move quicker - our ideal is: apply Monday, offer by Friday.Okay, so what will the actual process look like? 👀Recruiter quick chat. Our recruiter will check you are human, can communicate effectively and cover some of the basics like compensation, benefits and availability.Technical expertise. We will do a paired session with a twist - we will be the ones sharing our screen and writing the code.Product thinking. Chat to either our CPO, Dan, or a Product Manager about how you’ve demonstrated a product mindset in the past.Role chat. This will be with me and our Senior Engineering Manager, Sean.As part of the offer stage, we like to meet in person so you can connect with at least one member of the team before you start.Interested? Let’s go!
about 1 month ago