Platform Engineer

Location: Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Salary: £71,043 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension.

Do your best work, for the right reasons. We’re looking for an experienced Platform 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.

About the Role

We've built a lot, fast. Now we want to make it last. As a young organisation, we've used modern technology to move quickly and get remarkable products into teachers' hands. We've proven what's possible. Now we're maturing, making sure the foundations are as strong as what's built on top of them. We see this role as central to that change.

You’ll work with engineering, product, and research colleagues to build confidence in using observability principles that deepen our understanding of how teachers and pupils use our products, and help us keep improving them. We work in product squads alongside designers, researchers, and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements so teachers and pupils get quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.

Alongside other members of the platform engineering group, you’ll enable squads to move more quickly by optimising tooling and implementing automations, including the effective and safe use of AI. You’ll drive the creation and adoption of engineering standards across code, deployment, security, observability, and monitoring. And you’ll be a key driver of automation, working with the rest of the platform team to improve the overall developer experience.

You’ll need a good understanding of platform engineering in a SaaS-heavy environment and the value it brings to an organisation. A solid grounding in development practices, security fundamentals, and infrastructure operation matters. But specific technical skills are less important to us than a passion for automation, an ability to understand complex systems, and a pragmatic engineering approach.

As part of the Oak team, you’ll contribute to the wider success and culture of the organisation, and support and role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.

What you'll be doing:

• Identifying and implementing automation to speed up development, secure systems or improve service quality.
• Helping teams maintain high service quality by promoting a culture of quality across engineering and product, and enabling squads to use SLOs and SLAs effectively.
• Contributing to the strategy and evolution of our monitoring, logging, and reporting solutions so developers can resolve problems quickly and get meaningful insights into application behaviour.
• Working in cross-functional, product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation.
• Deputising for other members of the platform team and taking on broader responsibilities as needed.

What we're looking for:

You’ll have strong professional experience working with event-driven architectures using serverless technologies such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Azure Serverless. Beyond that, you’ll bring:

• 3+ years experience leading the continuous improvement of cloud-based platform services, including event-driven and serverless architectures.
• Demonstrable experience collaboratively designing and implementing observability, monitoring, and reporting solutions for complex cloud infrastructures in a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure), including solutions for squad-specific use cases.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms and a working familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools.
• A collaborative approach, comfortable promoting and leading collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and able to frame work in terms of impact.

The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute across all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable moving quickly and with agility, and be confident working with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones, as required). You will continually look for ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent 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. If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

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.

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 age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.