- Hybrid: ~2 days/week in office (London, Edinburgh or Glasgow)
- Full-time
- Salary: £60000
Why this role exists
Chalk Learning was founded by a former teacher. We're building Chalk Access, the tool that helps teachers use evidence to support pupils with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities). We're contracted by the Scottish Government through the CivTech programme, and we recently won the Renaissance Philanthropy Tools Competition. We are on track to significantly impact education in the UK and internationally over the next 5 years.
The product was built by a three-person founding team. As we scale we need an engineer and technical leader who wants to build product, take responsibility for security and drive growth. Ideally this is a high-agency person with initiative who is happy to sit in real classrooms watching real teachers use what they shipped the week before and iterate based on this.
What you'll own
- Product engineering, end to end. You'll ship features from teacher conversation to production, often in the same week. Our stack: TypeScript, Vercel, Supabase.
- The technical stack. Over time, you'll become the person who knows our infrastructure best and makes it better.
- Security and data protection. We handle sensitive data, and we treat that as sacred. You'll grow into owning our security posture: working with our CTO, external reviews, and council data protection officers. We'll invest in getting you there.
- Technical leadership. You will be responsible for security and enabling faster development.
- Time in schools. Visiting classrooms, watching teachers use the product, and turning what you see into what we build next is part of the job.
- Whatever moves the needle. Some weeks that's a database migration; some weeks it's testing ad creative or fixing a landing page. We all do everything. Hopefully you find this exciting.
Your first 90 days
- Ship to production in week one
- Visit at least two schools and watch teachers use Chalk Access
- Take ownership of a meaningful slice of the product
- Contribute to a security review for a local authority deployment
Who you are
You don't need ten years of experience, we care far more about trajectory than CV length. You do need:
- Experience shipping full-stack web products (professionally, or through serious personal projects)
- Care and good judgement around data (including understanding why children's data demands stringent security)
- Genuine curiosity about users
- Willingness to be forward-deployed
- Appetite for breadth, the range of this role excites you
Especially nice to have:
- An interest in learning science and education
- A teaching background (of any description)
- Experience with LLM products, or with regulated/sensitive data (health, gov, fintech)
- Any growth or marketing experimentation experience
How we work
We're a small team. Phil (founder and CEO) was a teacher for five years before working at Arbor Education. He holds a masters in education from Harvard and a Computer Science Masters from Georgia Tech. Peyman (co-founder & CTO) was formerly senior developer at CISCO and CTO of Learning with Parents. Within the team we also have some of the top learning scientists in the country (Sarah Cottinghatt and Karl McGrath) We’re backed by the Scottish Government and Renaissance Philanthropy. We're a Community Interest Company.
Culture
We are building a unique team of technical and educational talent and we believe that with this strong team we can make a big difference to the outcomes of learners. Some of our values include:
- Think deeply to move quickly: Success for us means thinking deeply and challenging our own assumptions
- Democratic and fair: All employees have a voice in the organisation
- Principles over process: A small high-trust team
Logistics
- Office 2 days per week; flexible otherwise
- School visits require an enhanced DBS check (and PVG scheme membership for Scottish schools). We will organise this.
- You must have the right to work in the UK.
- Significant additional benefits
Our process
- Intro call (30 min) with co-founders to check mutual fit.
- Paid Work sample & System Design Interview: a realistic exercise based on actual teacher feedback about our product. You can either create a design or a working application and we will ask you to justify design decisions.
- Paid trial day: build with us for a day, meet everyone. (If this isn’t possible we can work around your needs)
- Offer: usually within 1 week of trial day.