Staff Engineer (Core Product)

hackajob is collaborating with Arbor Education to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role. Location Remote Salary £100,000 - £120,000

About Us

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.

At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity – but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education every day: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

About The Role

We are looking for an experienced and highly knowledgeable Staff Engineer (Core Product) to join our Engineering team and help drive architecture and technical strategy across our growing suite of core products. The remit and focus of the role is to work across domains on our most complex problems and critical initiatives, helping teams deliver outcomes whilst ensuring architectural excellence. Over time, this role will go where the value is, meaning you should be excited by working across a range of teams and priorities. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge – if you’re a collaborative and innovative candidate, this is the role for you.

Core Responsibilities

• Own and deliver clear target architectures, strategies and roadmaps to support our product suite and strategic direction.
• Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands‑on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements.
• Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals.
• Lead our shift to an AI‑First way of working, architecting new SDLC foundations and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains across all teams.
• Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth.
• Act as a role model for technical leadership – work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output.
• Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standards.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed.
• Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify dependencies/risks, and report progress against strategic goals.

Requirements

• Extensive track record of delivering outcomes and leading across large, complex product suites, within a scaling and fast‑moving environment.
• Broad understanding of software architecture, system design, and scalable integration patterns observed from a range of environments.
• Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non‑technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes.
• An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross‑functional teams.
• Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are a core responsibility for every engineer.
• Deep experience guiding teams in architectural design, de‑risking complex initiatives through MVP/0‑1 thinking, and framework adoption.
• An understanding and opinion on how AI‑first engineering will change the SDLC and ways of working, ideally with worked examples.
• Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils).
• Practical knowledge of and exposure to some of our core stack or equivalent technologies – PHP, Node, React, Python, MySQL, AWS.
• Experience navigating between monolithic and distributed architectures with a pragmatic understanding of the value of each.

Benefits

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more.
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas.
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary.
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, mental health support, counselling and personalised Health Checks.
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa.
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows.
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay.
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life.
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching).
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you.
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success.
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc).
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year.
• Dog friendly offices!

Interview Process

• Phone screen
• 1st stage
• 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at careers@arbor-education.com. Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice.

Equal Opportunities

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation. Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive – whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.

Visa Sponsorship

We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.