Software Engineer

About us:

EnglishScore is a global mobile English test by the British Council. We help institutions, employers, and learners test and prove their English proficiency quickly, reliably, and at scale. Our mission is to build the most accessible, trusted, and innovative English assessment platform in the world.

We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer with experience in running multiple different systems in production for real users. You'll work with our Product Owner, mobile development team, and other software engineers to build and improve our apps, websites, and systems. These include our iOS, Android, and web-based versions of our EnglishScore test, our B2B dashboard, and our internal tools.

Who are you

First and foremost, you're a backend developer. You've worked on services with large user bases, providing APIs that are consumed by mobile apps. You've made mistakes, but you've learned from them. Data, security, and performance are all in your blood, but you also know that collaboration and teamwork is essential.

You've worked with others using some of the best industry practices around agile development, and know how to extract requirements from stakeholders to ensure that any testing is focused on the relevant business needs.

You're comfortable being the most experienced backend engineer in the room and enjoy taking end-to-end ownership from design and architecture to infrastructure and monitoring. We are looking to make big waves in this industry, and we want talented, interesting people to join us on the journey.

The role

We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer with experience in running multiple different systems in production for real users. You'll work with our Product Owner, mobile development team, and other software engineers to build and improve our apps, websites, and systems. These include our iOS, Android, and web-based versions of our EnglishScore test, our B2B dashboard, and our internal tools.

Day to day, your core focus will be to ensure that our API infrastructure and web-base applications are reliable and growing to meet our business needs.

What you'll lead:

• Shape and evolve the API infrastructure and web-applications to support product scale and complexity
• Identify and drive improvements in performance, observability, and infrastructure
• Lead the design of domain models aligned with evolving business needs
• Engineering-centric requirement definition (user stories) and analysis;

This means you must:

• Be fluent in Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Postgres, Vite, Javascript, and Typescript
• Be able to effectively design APIs, scalable web-applications and database/object schemas
• Know how to strike the right balance between pragmatic agile iterative development and longer-term investment to manage technical debt.
• Have a passion for well-communicated designs, flows, and technical implementation;
• Have experience and know how to successfully manage CI/CD, including deployments to production that involve database schema updates without scheduled downtime.
• Implement new features with monitoring best practices in mind.
• Be able to lead data-centric technical conversations, highlighting design trade-offs and guide data definition;
• Have the ability to take ownership of issues - to analyse and identify problems not faced before.
• Communicate clearly with non-engineers (e.g., product, ops, stakeholders)

There are a few other skills that would be useful but not essential to have, including:

• Experience with AWS IAM and AWS SSO
• Production use of AWS Lambda
• Architecting and implementing with GDPR / privacy by design, and implementing appropriate security requirements

And to do this well at EnglishScore, we expect you to have experience with many of the following:

• AWS and/or Heroku
• Using APM or similar tooling to enable prioritisation of performance and defects
• Working on products for international audiences
• Using analytics to guide and refine priorities
• Collaborating with Product Owners, UX teams, and other stakeholders

Our stack

Our technological stack is very robust. iOS is authored in Swift, Android in Kotlin, and our backend is written in Python. Our infrastructure is running on Heroku, and our pipeline is heavily automated through Travis. We are at a sufficiently early stage that nothing is set in stone, so you'll be able to make a case for using any technology you think would help us reach our goals more effectively.