For over 15 million learners, FutureLearn is the gateway to high-quality lifelong learning – something we’re truly passionate about in our mission to transform access to education. Partnering with over 260 international educational institutions and businesses, we up-skill learners and fire up their creativity, interest – and, of course, their CVs! – with our online courses. We’re building a connected, collaborative, global community where learning is available for all. We’re on the cusp of emerging from a plucky EdTech start-up into a truly transformational business, with meaty goals for the next five years. You could help us achieve those goals, working in a dynamic environment and with a truly passionate team

At FutureLearn we work in multidisciplinary product teams, collaborating with designers, engineers, product managers and stakeholders. We work in short sprints & regularly share, reflect on and iterate on our work. This helps us focus on shipping small, iterative changes and responding quickly to changing business or user needs. We care about work/life balance and supporting learning at work.

Our Principal Engineers work alongside our product teams and are responsible for leading on and making technical decisions. They work closely with the Technical Leads and Product Managers to provide technical direction for current work, as well as supporting the software engineers on the product teams.

The Principal Engineers work closely with the Lead Technical Architect and VP of Engineering to provide cohesive direction for bigger pieces of technical work and a clear strategy for longer-term technical decisions. Principal Engineers manage the security, privacy, and other legal & compliance-related aspects of our code and collaborate with our SRE and Scalable Platform team on infrastructural decisions and plans.

Our technology stack

Our main app uses the Ruby on Rails web framework with React, and we also have a standalone frontend app using TypeScript, NextJS and GraphQL to integrate with the Rails app. We use unit, integration and acceptance tests to drive design and keep everything working. Every engineer has the ability to deploy, and we deploy multiple times per day to a large-scale system on AWS, supported by our Site Reliability Engineers. We use Datadog to monitor our application and infrastructure. We also have a very popular internal developer CLI tool written in Go.

As a Principal Engineer at FutureLearn, you will jointly lead on technical direction, championing a bold & ambitious approach to technology. You will be responsible for helping to decide the future of the architecture of the FutureLearn app, and weighing the costs, benefits and risks of changes. You will manage the security, privacy, and other legal & compliance-related aspects of our code and collaborate with our Site Reliability Engineers on infrastructural decisions and plans.

You will participate in hands-on development work in Ruby, Typescript and React, supporting the building of new features and ensuring the ongoing functionality, health and maintenance of our codebase and ensuring effective technical practices. You’ll support software engineers through pairing, teaching, mentoring, coaching, code review and technical support, and demonstrating the practices of an effective developer.

You’ll coordinate complex technical work across product teams to ensure consistent and proactive approaches to solving technical problems. You’ll communicate the reasons and consequences of architecture and infrastructural decisions effectively to other developers, and you’ll maintain communication with engineers, Technical Leads and the Lead Technical Architect about current technical progress and problems.

You’ll encourage a culture of shared technical learning through reading, training and experimentation, with the aim of demystifying complex technology and improving understanding. You’ll encourage a culture of methodical, consistent, sustainable working through improved technical practices (clear commits, high-value tests, appropriate documentation etc).

We’re looking for an experienced engineer who has been responsible for making technical decisions and providing technical direction across multiple product teams.

You should have previous experience building, supporting and deploying large, interactive web applications at scale, taking into account performance, security and maintainability. You can write robust, well-factored, modular code, alongside high-value tests. Our technical stack is quite broad, so we welcome applications from people with experience in any of the following: Ruby, Rails, React, Typescript, NextJS, GraphQL, or Go.

Ideally you’ll also have experience of incrementally improving a large legacy codebase and shaping it into sensible, well-organised modular components, alongside delivering features in a cross-functional agile product team.

Above all, we are looking for people who are curious, think critically, are eager to learn and are keen to use their experience to help and support others. You will need to be able to communicate and explain things clearly and work well in a collaborative environment.

• £80,000 - £95,000 depending on experience
• Hybrid Working Model
• 28 days of Annual Leave plus UK Public Holidays
• Roll over up to 5 days Holiday
• Buy and Sell up to 5 days Holiday
• Westfield Health Cash Plan
• Personal ‘recharge’ days, no questions asked
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Season Ticket Loan
• Charity work – 1 day dedicated to a charity of your choice
• Calm Premium Subscription

Ready to go for it? Click 'Apply', include your CV and a cover letter telling us why you'd like to become a FutureLearner, and how you’ll nail this role.

Please contact jobs@futurelearn.com if you require any reasonable adjustments or alterations to be made to support you through the recruitment process.

We value all the great benefits that diversity brings and encourage everyone to bring their whole self to work – At FutureLearn we are proud to have Diversity and Inclusion at the centre of everything we do. We are committed to Equal Employment Opportunity regardless of race, colour, national origin, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion.

We can't wait to meet you! #FutureLearnCareers