[no name] is a new initiative spun up as part of The Key Group of companies. Its mission is to bring the possibilities unleashed by recent AI advances into the UK education sector. Our companies serve over 20,000 schools, and are all bound by a shared desire to improve the lives of children and young people.
As one of our first employees you'll be working closely alongside Joe Blair, James Sharp and Chris Mitchell. Joe has been with The Key since its pilot project, and recently spent one year as a No 10 Innovation Fellow. James is an ex-Cambridge astrophysicist who co-founded and built GovernorHub. Chris is one of The Key's longest standing employees and a technical wizard who can translate thoughts into reality seemingly overnight. Between us we've founded, grown and sold businesses from nothing. In the process we've created some of the most influential products in the sector.
Over the past year we've been blown away by the emerging powers of so-called “Software 2.0”. In particular, generative AI and Large Language Models. There's huge potential to make an impact in the sector and it unlocks use-cases that were previously out of reach. We've been playing and experimenting with it internally - [no name] is our ambition to bring some of these ideas to market.
[no name] will not initially be tackling in-classroom education. Instead we're looking to bring real quality of life improvements to educational organisations themselves. In doing so we'll allow funding, teaching and support to better focus on what matters - the quality of the education of our children.
As a Software Engineer you'll not only be instrumental in bringing our ideas to life, you'll be helping come up with those ideas too. We're a small team, with great ambition at a very early stage. Therefore you'll be involved in all aspects of product development to some extent. Designing, prototyping, developing, scaling, supporting, deploying, enhancing, maintaining, bug fixing. We're largely building from scratch so there's not yet any technical debt to contend with and you should expect to be working with a variety of technologies that may well change over time.
You'll be a “manager of one”. You won't be micromanaged or told exactly what to do. Instead you'll be given problems (they'll probably be tricky) and you'll be responsible for coming up with, implementing and then delivering solutions. We'll give you all the support you need to achieve this (Chris and James have a load of experience between them, and across the Group there's tons more), but fundamentally you'll be fully responsible for your output.
You'll also be expected to embrace learning about the education sector and the customers we'll be directly serving (and The Key Group is probably one of the best places to do this!). This is crucial to building great software, but we've also found it to be one of the most fulfilling parts of the job.
Overall, we can't think of a better environment to learn and to directly see the impact you're having.
We strongly encourage candidates of all backgrounds and identities to apply. Diversity of thought and of experience will be crucial to our success.
The paradigm of building products on top of Software 2.0 is only just starting to seep out of the larger tech companies, and as such the way forwards is fairly uncharted. We'll be working out how to do effective product development in this world as we go. The way you think is much more important than having the “right” past experience.
It's worth pointing out two things that are not necessarily required:
That being said, this is not a role for someone new to coding.
We're looking for someone who loves making things, who can't resist the urge to tinker and build, and who has a history of learning through doing. Similarly, we're not explicitly looking for any particular areas of expertise. But if you have a domain where you think you're particularly strong, or that you're passionate about, and you think it's going to be important then let's talk (e.g. those of you who like to think about UX - it feels like there's lots of exciting opportunities in this area...)!
There are also some general characteristics that you'll need:
And some things that may play in your favour:
If this sounds like you - we look forward to seeing your application!
We offer the same benefits as The Key - see here for details.
40-90k dependent on skillset, expertise etc.
*[no name] - sorry this is a rubbish name. We haven't actually come up with one yet...