Full-Stack Technology and Systems Lead

About Us

Learning with Parents supports all families to have positive learning interactions together and leads the sector to learn what works in tackling inequality.

In partnership with 150 primary schools, we support families across the UK to enjoy learning together at home. Families are motivated to sustain and enjoy frequent and positive interactions at home.

Our parental engagement journey with schools starts by focussing on reading. Our digital reading log is an inclusive way for schools and families to record reading, replacing physical reading records.

Our full Maths and English programme builds on the positive habits fostered by our reading log. It replaces traditional Maths and English homework with fun activities which have parent-child interaction at their heart. Through behavioural insight research, innovative technology and teacher training we ensure that as many families as possible are supported effectively. 

We are working to improve parental engagement across the sector, by producing evidence of parents’ impact and generating insights into how schools can best support them. Learnings are disseminated through the Parental Engagement Forum and amplified through the Fair Education Alliance.

You can read our 2023 impact report here and see our latest news and blogs here.

About the Role

We are looking for a technologist to help us in the next phase of scaling our web platform and supporting the communities we serve. To date our tech support has all come through an external team, and now we are excited to add an in-house role with significant support from our experienced (part-time) CTO and an external team.

You will work across a range of technologies on a variety of problems, which may include working with the team to triage urgent bugs; making improvements in our testing setup and CI/CD pipeline; understanding and investigating our data; supporting with IT issues; and more.

This is a flexible role in a growing charity, with the opportunity to build and deploy solutions from the ground up. As well as our CTO, the former lead engineer will be on hand to answer questions and support (0.2FTE), and the team developing features has experience working on this app. We will look to expand this team over time as the charity continues to grow.

Our technology

Our platform is built on the following stack, so familiarity with some of these, or equivalents, will be helpful for this role.

• Platforms: AWS, Vercel, Cloudflare

• Frameworks/technologies: NextJS, NestJS (Typescript), GraphQL, Postgres

• Code: Github

• Test: Cypress, Jest, Lambdatest

• Monitoring: New Relic, Zabbix

We also use a range of common cloud systems in managing the IT side of the organisation, including Google Workspace and InTune.

Areas of Responsibility

Monitoring and resolving issues

• Performing root cause analysis of production errors and resolving technical issues (with support from tech lead and development team)

• Communicating with the school partnership team and content development team to understand requirements and keep them updated on issue progress

• Designing procedures for system troubleshooting and maintenance

• Building tools to reduce occurrence of errors and improve customer experience

• Providing level 2/3 technical support

Platform engineering, pipelines and deployment

• Setting up CI/CD pipelines for our products

• Building and maintaining development tools and infrastructure

• Deploying updates and fixes to production environments

• Working on ways to automate and improve development and release processes

• Building and deploying automation and monitoring solutions

• Ensuring that systems are safe and secure against cybersecurity threats

Support with data

• Liaising with the wider team to understand data needs

• Writing and reviewing SQL queries, including to extract anonymised data or report statistics

• Creating data dashboards (potentially with volunteer support)

• Making sure our Postgres database is operating efficiently and reviewing updates

IT

• Support with laptop setup

• Support with issues with a range of cloud services

• Working with users to ensure the tools are meeting user needs and proposing solutions

Due to the nature of our work with young people, on acceptance of offers all Learning with Parents employees are subject to a DBS check in accordance with Safeguarding Policies and offers will also be subject to reference checks.