Department: Product & Technology
Location: Home based, UK
Reports to: Senior Full Stack Engineer
Hours: 37.5 per week
Salary: k
Role Overview
As a Full Stack Engineer at Cambridge Spark, you will be responsible for
Key responsibilities:
1. Collaborate with a small, fast-paced team to contribute to the architectural evolution of an innovative Data & AI education platform and take the technical lead on individual features and small projects.
2. Design, architect, and maintain highly scalable APIs and data pipelines.
3. Take ownership of and significantly contribute to backend systems that handle large volumes of data from the learner's journey, focusing on performance and reliability.
4. Develop complex front-end features and user interfaces using, ensuring maintainability, testability, and adherence to best practices, including robust unit testing.
5. Architect, optimize, and troubleshoot efficient SQL queries and database schemas in PostgreSQL, ensuring data integrity and performance at scale.
6. Define and implement best practices for leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services to support a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure.
7. Diagnose and resolve complex issues and bugs, mentoring junior team members and promptly responding to support tickets to maintain platform reliability and customer satisfaction.
8. Lead project work for specific features, gathering requirements, scoping, and translating business objectives into technical designs to support other functions within the business.
Candidate Specification:
Essential
9. 4+ years of professional experience as a Full Stack Engineer or similar role
10. Strong expertise with a Python web framework (Flask, Django, etc.) and the ability to design and implement RESTful APIs
11. Proven experience designing, deploying, and managing resources with a major cloud provider (GCP or equivalent), including familiarity with infrastructure-as-code principles
12. Expertise with software development tools and processes (advanced Git, robust CI/CD pipelines, comprehensive monitoring/logging) and DevOps practices
13. Strong proficiency with HTML, CSS, and a modern Javascript framework, React, or equivalent), with a focus on building high-performance, well-structured, and accessible UIs
14. Hands-on experience implementing and maintaining robust Frontend unit testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Mocha, Vue Test Utils)
15. Advanced knowledge of SQL (Postgres, MySQL, SQLite or equivalent), including query optimization, indexing strategies, and database schema design
16. AI-Driven Development: Proficient in leveraging LLM-powered development tools—such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or Claude Dev—to accelerate code generation, refactoring, and debugging while maintaining high standards for code quality and security.
Desirable
We expect candidates at this level to have a strong working knowledge of several of these, indicating immediate impact and growth potential.
Frontend and UX/UI:
17. Experience writing and maintaining Cypress or similar integration/E2E test frameworks for end-to-end reliability
18. Proven track record in UX/UI, specifically designing and implementing responsive, accessible (WCAG standards), and performant UIs
Backend and Infrastructure
19. Demonstrated experience building and maintaining high-scale applications: infrastructure planning, performance profiling, sophisticated monitoring
20. Familiarity with building LLM-powered features using frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex, with an understanding of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and vector databases to create context-aware chatbots.
21. Comfortable with containerization using Docker for development, testing, and deployment
22. Practical, production-level experience with Kubernetes debugging, orchestration and management
Miscellaneous
23. Familiarity with the Python Data Science stack (Pandas, Sklearn, Numpy, etc.)
24. Experience working with Learning Management Systems (LMS) at an integration or platform level
Strong interest in education / EdTech and a passion for leveraging technology to drive learning outcomes
Company Benefits:
25. Remote first company providing flexibility to work from home
26. Pension with up to 5% matched contributions
27. Opportunity to opt into our salary sacrifice scheme
28. 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
29. A day for volunteering
30. Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
31. Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
32. Annual Summer and Xmas events
33. Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
34. CPD Allowance
35. Private medical insurance and cash plan
36. Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
37. EAP with 24 hour confidential support line
Background to our Organisation
We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.
We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.
Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.
Our Values
At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:
Entrepreneurial
We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.
Team Spirit
Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.
Customer-focused
Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.
Gold Standard
We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.
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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.