Senior Platform Engineer

Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Salary: £82,409 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Platform Engineer to help us build beautifully simple, high-impact digital products that support teachers and improve outcomes for pupils across the UK.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)

• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact

• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

💡 About the Role

We've built a lot, fast. Now we want to make it last.

As a young organisation, we've used modern technology to move quickly and get remarkable products into teachers' hands. We've proven what's possible. Now we're maturing, making sure the foundations are as strong as what's built on top of them. We see this role as central to that change.

You'll work with engineering teams to build confidence in our systems using observability and monitoring visibility into the health, performance and reliability of our infrastructure and services, and enabling teams to identify and resolve issues quickly.Our product squads include designers, researchers, and education experts, regularly releasing new features and improvements so teachers and pupils get quick and easy access to the highest quality learning resources.

Alongside other members of the platform engineering group, you'll enable squads to move more quickly by optimising tooling and implementing automations, including the effective and safe use of AI. You'll drive the creation and adoption of engineering standards across code, deployment, security, observability, and monitoring.

You'll need a good understanding of platform engineering in a SaaS-heavy environment and the value it brings to an organisation. A solid grounding in development practices, security fundamentals, and infrastructure operation matters. But specific technical skills are less important to us than a passion for automation, an ability to understand complex systems, and a pragmatic engineering approach.

You'll also role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.

💡What you'll be doing:

• Lead the continuous improvement of observability, performance, reliability and security across Oak’s cloud infrastructure and platform services. Own the quality and usability of the platform that enables development teams to build, deploy and operate services effectively.

• Apply this across our web applications (Next.js, JavaScript, TypeScript) and serverless functions (Google Cloud Functions, Cloudflare), deployed on Vercel and Cloudflare.

• Shape the strategy for our monitoring, logging and reporting, so developers can resolve problems quickly and get meaningful insight into how our applications behave.

• Help squads maintain high service quality by promoting a culture of quality across engineering and product, and using SLOs and SLAs effectively.

• Lead the adoption and maintenance of infrastructure as code across Oak’s cloud platforms, promoting reproducibility, auditability and consistency.

• Responsible for the continuous improvement of the developer experience across Oak’s platform tools and services, gathering feedback from engineering teams to inform priorities.

• Identify and implement automations that speed up development, improve security or raise the quality of what we deliver.

• Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.

• As a member of the Oak Team, contribute to the planning and culture of the organisation.

• Deputise for other members of the Platform team and take on other general responsibilities as required.

🌱 What we're looking for

You'll have strong professional experience working with event-driven architectures using serverless technologies such as Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Azure Serverless.

Beyond that, you'll bring:

• 5+ years’ experience leading the continuous improvement of cloud-based platform services, including event-driven and serverless architectures (for example Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda or Azure Serverless).

• Considerable experience designing and implementing observability, monitoring and reporting solutions for complex cloud infrastructures in a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS or Azure), including solutions for squad-specific use cases.

• Proven experience in infrastructure-as-code tools and practices, with experience promoting reproducibility and consistency across cloud environments.

• Proven experience of security controls for cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, including secrets management, access control and least-privilege principles.

• Proven experience translating technical platform priorities for non-technical stakeholders.

• Confidence reading and maintaining web application code, with the ability to design and build small apps, preferably in JavaScript or TypeScript.

• A collaborative approach to leading work across engineering, product and research, framing it in terms of impact.

The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute across all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable moving quickly and with agility, and be confident working with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones, as required). You will continually look for ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively.

📖 See how we work

Want to know more about how we build our products? Our Engineering Substack shares how we build AI and data tools for education, including the decisions, trade-offs and lessons we've learned along the way. Read Oak's Engineering Substack - https://engineering.thenational.academy/

💛 Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working — we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

🌈 Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors. 

If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.

📌 Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: Sunday, 1 November 2026.

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps

You’ll answer a few admin questions and some questions related to your day-to-day job. Your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans), so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.

If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.

Interview dates:

Stage 1: Technical interview (60 minutes), week commencing 16 November 2026. A chance to show how you approach platform problems.

Stage 2: Final interview (60 minutes), week commencing 23 November 2026

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, don't leave it too long to avoid missing out.

We are an equal opportunity employer.

We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.