Staff Software Engineer in Scotland

An excellent opportunity to join a well-regarded Ed-Tech organisation with a strong presence in Glasgow. You will have the opportunity to shape and build solutions used by students across the globe. Build and evolve a cloud-based product used at meaningful scale. This is a senior, hands-on role for an engineer who enjoys shaping technical direction, raising engineering standards, and helping multiple squads deliver reliably without stepping away from the code.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain production services and customer-facing features, from early discovery through to release and operation.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple squads: clarify goals, reduce ambiguity and help teams converge on pragmatic solutions.
• Partner closely with Product and Design to turn outcomes into shippable increments, keeping communication crisp and expectations aligned.
• Set a high bar for engineering quality: architecture, code health, testing discipline, observability and operational readiness.
• Work with reliability/operations colleagues to improve uptime, performance, incident response and capacity planning.
• Own and improve delivery ways of working: estimation approaches, planning, prioritisation, and predictable execution against epics.
• Continuously modernise existing systems; simplify, automate, and remove friction to increase delivery speed.
• Contribute to the technical roadmap for your domain, balancing near-term delivery with longer-term platform evolution.
• Collaborate on cross-cutting initiatives such as security, data and applied AI where they improve product outcomes.

Required Experience

• Significant commercial software engineering experience, operating at a senior/staff level.
• Comfort leading through influence: you can align teams, coach engineers, and drive decisions without relying on hierarchy.
• A strong sense of ownership and follow-through. You should be comfortable being accountable for outcomes, not just tasks.
• A bias for action paired with good judgement: you can move quickly while managing risk in production systems.
• Evidence of improving how teams work (quality, delivery, reliability, developer experience) and challenging the status quo constructively.
• Clear communicator who can tailor detail for different audiences: engineers, product partners and leadership.
• Deep capability in at least one mainstream programming language and ecosystem, with the range to be effective in others.
• Practical experience designing and running cloud-native services, including infrastructure, deployment and operational tooling.
• Confidence diagnosing complex issues in distributed systems (performance, reliability, tricky production defects).
• Strong grasp of data storage and access patterns, with hands-on experience across relational and/or NoSQL databases.
• Comfort working with modern engineering practices: automated testing, code review, CI/CD, observability and secure-by-design thinking.
• Curiosity about emerging approaches (including applied and agentic AI) and the ability to adopt them responsibly where they add value.

Reasonable Adjustments

Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients. If you need any help or adjustments during the recruitment process for any reason, please let us know when you apply or talk to the recruiters directly so we can support you.