Zen Locum

Product Engineer

High level stuff you might be filtering against ????

Location: Remote (UK timezone +/- 6 hrs generally). In the UK we will hire you as an employee. In other countries you’ll need to be setup as a contractor initially.

Type: Full-time

Salary: Location dependent, but our current range in the UK is £75k to £110k for reference. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.

What I am looking for

???? Hi, I’m Martin, VP of Engineering at Zen Educate and I’m looking for engineers who can make an impact on the real world problem of education staffing, and do it through engineering excellence.

Every place has its own understanding of what engineering excellence looks like (sometimes written down, sometimes not). Here’s what it means to me and Zen:

• Valuing real world outcomes and shared learning over output
• Product thinking over pure tech - start with the problem, ship quickly and iterate.
• Team success and sustainability over individual heroics.

We are a small, but mighty team and so every engineer has the opportunity to make an outsized impact and put their stamp on what excellence looks like in practice. What do I mean by “small”? Today we have 4 product teams and 24 engineers including Tech Lead Managers and Principals.

We recognise the world is not static - “what got us here, won’t get us there” - so we look for curiosity, adaptability and proactiveness as fundamental traits. The engineers I see be the most successful are those who focus on solving problems, look to help others and just happen to typically leverage technology to do so.

So whether you’re passionate about building great products, scaling systems, or improving team processes, you’ll thrive at Zen if you care deeply about users, focus on real-world outcomes, pursue continuous learning and strive to make others better ????

What we are building and why

Getting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a crucial problem to solve, both for education outcomes for children and for the sustainability of an industry that spends billions on this.

Today the platform we are building supports internal operations teams on filling roles, educators on finding roles via our mobile app and schools on getting educators in for both short-term and long-term roles. The more we develop the platform (and the ability to self-serve in the marketplace), the more efficient the whole process becomes, which means more money going back to educators and into classrooms (over £30 million since 2017).

We are well established in the UK and growing at a phenomenal rate in the US ????

What we need now is to reach the next level in how we build our platform to support this growth. That’s where you come in ????

What the role looks like in practice

I’ve written a bunch of words above that I hope capture your interest and excitement ✨. But what really matters is what reality looks like and the best people to share that are the existing engineers on the team. So here are a few glimpses from your potential peers of some of what they have done in a week:

“I liaised with the Finance team to help re-run a set of invoices that originally failed from our automated invoice service, and I helped implement a feature to convert a long term booking into a job role - to more accurately reflect how teachers work and track job conversions. Then I shared some design feedback for a booking credit system that was initially less well defined.” - Jai

“I implemented a compensation system that will cover the additional fees for teachers, which will allow schools to book needed teachers” - Kamil

“I was updating the job details view in our React Native app to show more information to teachers about the school and job dates to make the job offers more attractive and useful. I also upgraded our backend Rails app to use latest version of Ruby, Sidekiq, Rack and Puma” - Adrian

“I started the week by pushing some small updates to our React Native app, and then finished the week by shipping a feature to improve the experience of schools finding teachers and managing to clean up a bunch of legacy code in the process.” - Chris

“I explored the feasibility of using Google Document AI to extract data from documents uploaded by candidates and validate them, improving automation for our onboarding process" - Lucas

“I implemented backend and frontend MixPanel events for crucial workflows to better understand how users interact with our product and what we can improve on." - Georgi

“I spent some time monitoring Sentry to spot performance trends and debug issues. I also built an automated rota in Coda for our Native release process, before reviewing Product Refinement Docs and contributing to shaping the solutions.” - Ethan

What you might like or dislike

Every place makes tradeoffs based on what they value and where they are in their journey ⚖️. Here’s a list of things you might find useful in figuring out if this is the right role for you. If we end up chatting, feel free to dig deeper into any of them. Note that some of these are recent changes in our approach and may be “work in progress” when you join.

???? How We Work

• Boring tech for the obvious, experimentation for the rest. Our core is Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, running on Heroku + Cloudflare etc. But we have also evaluated Amazon Personalise as a candidate for our matching system and spiked out our own AI powered knowledge-base.
• Process serves performance. We use agile sprints and other structure to support, but our focus is on outcomes not following rules. Greater performance gives greater freedom - think “Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that and just play.”
• Engineers as problem shapers (not ticket takers). You’ll thrive here if you want to shape problems, not just deliver tickets. Our Product Managers and Designers are partners you pull on for leverage rather than task givers who hide the users away.
• Daily shipping culture. We ship regularly and want to get even better at it. We are investing in this and welcome those who’ll help us start smaller and iterate faster.

???? Growth & Progression

• Choose your own career path. We care more about impact and learning than rigid competency grids. This means greater flexibility in what progression looks like, but requires you to build an understanding of what we value from guiding principles and shared real-world examples.
• Few Titles, infinite Levels. We use Levels instead of Titles to show growth in a Role. You won’t see titles like Associate, Senior, or Staff here. Instead, you can grow continuously by getting better at your current role - e.g. working faster, safer, and more independently. Changing roles is possible too, but depends on business needs, since different roles aim for different business outcomes and typically use different skills.
• Investment over reward as a mindset. Level changes are tightly coupled to compensation changes. Confidence in a Level change is based on sustainably doing great work at your current level. We think it is fairer to invest in what you do next, rather than reward you doing the next Level first for free!

???? Compensation

• Market reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that’s not just where you live). We don’t believe anyone has found a great solution to global compensation, so we aim instead to be clear and equitable in how we do it.
• Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).
• Think long term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn’t the right time to join us.

???? Team Culture & Collaboration

• Distributed engineering team. Solid communication skills and async habits are key to be effective. You’ll find strong connection here, but not through engineering getting together in-person. If you like the buzz of working near others you are welcome to work from one of our offices, but there won’t be many engineers there on any given day.
• We believe in impact and measurable outcomes, alongside shared learning. If your work moves the needle or teaches us something meaningful then that’s a win. If not, then we’ll want to understand why.
• Balanced, sustainable work. Long hours are not a badge of honour - they are an indication something isn’t working well. We value a sustainable pace and healthy teams.
• Diversity is good in some ways and lacking in others. You might be the first of something here. That matters and we’ll support appropriately if you are.

How we hire

Hire fast, fix fast. Hiring today is...not great, with most companies being too cautious and taking too long to make a decision ????. We move quicker - our ideal is: apply Monday, offer by Friday. Then we invest heavily in the most important part - your onboarding. We ensure you are setup for success, with clear direction, experience of different teams and shipping to production within days.

Whilst fast doesn’t mean frivolous, it does slightly increase the risk that you or we made a mistake. So we include regular check-ins during onboarding to make sure expectations match reality. If either side feels something is off then we try to fix it fast. And sometimes that will mean saying “let’s not carry on” with respect.

Real talk. We believe in being direct and authentic. We’ll share the good, the messy and the challenges. We recognise we won’t have all the answers, still have much to learn, and that’s all part of the fun of this wild ride ????. We expect the same from you - after all we are just a bunch of humans trying to do great work together.

Mindset, not tools. We hire for how you think and create leverage, not what specific tools you’ve used before. To us, experience is just another tool - it is only valuable through how you leverage it. Curiosity, adaptability, product thinking - those are the durable qualities in a changing world. And we value different opinions, so ensure you share yours - have a point of view, maybe debate a little and we will respect that.

Always open to great people. We are always hiring and happy to chat even if the timing isn’t quite right. That’s why you might see this job post open for a long time. We are not collecting resumes or doing stealth market research, we just believe in the power of serendipity. To make that more transparent - right now we have a clear need for at least 2 more engineers in the team.

Okay, so what will the actual process look like? ????

• Recruiter quick chat. Our recruiter will check you are human, can communicate effectively and cover some of the basics like compensation, benefits and availability.
• Technical expertise. We will do a paired session with a twist - we will be the ones sharing our screen and writing the code. So come prepared to ask questions, drive progress with another engineer and dig through an ambiguous past problem in our codebase.
• Product thinking. Chat to either our CPTO or a Product Manager about how you’ve demonstrated a product mindset in the past. Or if you haven’t had opportunity to do that, tell us why and what you’d do differently with us.
• Role chat. This will be with me and I’ll be wanting to understand how you think and approach the role and engineering excellence. I’ll start by asking you the question you include in your application. And I’ll want to dig into your answers so that this becomes more of a conversation and shared exploration than a Q&A session ????.

After the recruiter chat, the remaining sessions can happen in any order and as quickly as our schedules can align. You could do them all in a day if you want or spread them out a bit.

Once interviewers have shared their feedback from each session we do an internal debrief - that’s where we discuss what we are excited about you for in the role, any challenges we see and whether we think we can mitigate them at this time. From there we will make a decision and either proceed to offer or tell you that we not offering.

We believe feedback is important, but also know not everyone wants it - so we don’t share it by default. If you’d like feedback after the process, just let us know. Note that we’ll frame the feedback from our perspective of why we did or did not have the confidence rather than as a commentary on you.

Interested? Let’s go!

If you read all of the above and are excited (maybe even a little nervous) about the opportunity and how we work then I recommend applying now! If you skipped or skimmed the above, feel free to apply anyway but you’re missing a bunch of useful information that could streamline the process for you ????

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