Mid-Backend Engineer

We’re Atom and our mission is to democratise education. We use machine learning and a visually engaging tech platform to bring a fun, high-quality and personalised learning experience into every child’s home.

We combine exceptional teacher-made content with cutting-edge technology to provide fantastic affordable education to all children globally, regardless of background.

We’re one of Europe’s fastest-growing EdTech companies. Since 2018 we’ve grown from a startup of four friends to almost 120 people. Our brilliant colleagues include specialists across education, engineering, product, learning design and marketing.

We’re remote-first! While our main office is in London, our team is composed of over 120 people (and counting) working from 10 countries.
Atom Learning's been featured in Otta’s Annual Rocket List: the 100 fastest-growing companies to work for!

The role

Atom Learning is looking for an experienced Node developer (mid/senior) to join our growing engineering team.

Our engineers re-invent education by working in cross-functional, autonomous pods. Each pod is self organising and adopts Scrum or Kanban depending on their unique challenges at the time. Our back-end microservices are built using Node, TypeScript & NestJS, backed with MySQL databases and Redis, with a strong focus on testing and good engineering practices. Our front-end is built using React & ESNext, tested in Jest using the React Testing Library and Cypress.

You will be responsible for expanding, refactoring and maintaining our microservice back-end to support the rapid growth of our products. You will work on new features for end-users, as well as internal services for the Atom Learning team.

This role is fully remote. The only requirement is that you can sync up with your pod on a UK based timezone, you’ll have the option of working from our lovely London office for as much or as little as you like, but that’s totally your call.

We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Tech stack: Node, TypeScript, NestJS, React, Python, MySQL, Redis, Kubernetes

Don’t worry too much about having experience with our specific tech stack - we believe most hard engineering problems are independent of specific tools or technology, so we prioritise looking for people with strong core engineering skills and principles, that are open to learning new things.

In this role, you will

• Develop features using NodeJS, TypeScript & NestJS, with testing done in Jest;
• Assist in designing and architecting our systems to improve performance & scalability;
• Have a say in what we build, not just how to build it, through collaboration with your team, including the product manager and designer;
• Participate in code reviews to maintain our coding standards;
• Analyse and organise technical work to deliver measurable product improvements;
• Document your work and share this across the engineering team;
• Take responsibility for mentoring junior engineers in the team.

• You are a developer with 2 years+ Node experience;
• You have experience using the best development and testing practices to write clear, readable and well-tested code;
• You are able to create reusable solutions to fulfil a brief and support future changes;
• You have experience designing REST APIs and have a solid understanding of REST principles;
• You have a good understanding of relational database design.

Things that will set you apart

• You have a demonstrable passion for education;
• You are a pragmatist with the ability to balance short term needs with the longer term goals of growth and reliability;
• You have a product-oriented mindset with a focus on impact & user value;
• You’re a highly-motivated contributor with excellent teamwork skills - you love to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in whenever and wherever you can.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays;
• 3 days winter leave;
• Work from anywhere in the UK or within GMT +/-2 hours time zone; we're a remote-first company;
• Annual L&D budget;
• Private medical;
• EMI options available;
• Access to wellbeing platform;
• Competitive pay;
• Enhanced family leave;
• Monthly remote and in-person events in London;
• High degree of autonomy and exposure to the running of all business areas of a successful startup;
• Brilliant colleagues and the opportunity to become an integral member of a fast-growing tech company.

What we build

Our tech platform combines gamified learning exercises with machine learning to deliver world-class educational content which is engaging and adapts to each user’s specific knowledge and needs. We also apply data science to build analytics and other tools for educators and parents to also work in more targeted ways to encourage more learning.

Excellent user experience is at the heart of what we do. We build engaging user interfaces that make education fun and motivate kids to learn more. Those experiences are also powered by scalable microservices that process millions of interactions from students each month, and we’re constantly seeking improvements to the algorithms that power our AI so they find the right balance between challenging students whilst also ensuring they feel a sense of growth and accomplishment.

We <3 open source and are big believers in contributing back to the ecosystem. We’ve taken our first steps with our design system and can’t wait to share more tools with the dev community in the future.

How we work

Atom’s culture thrives on freedom and responsibility - we believe in hiring brilliant people and trusting them to approach their work in the way they think is best. You’ll work closely within a team of other people who are highly engaged in our mission, and love to solve difficult problems with a huge impact on positive social change, celebrating the big wins and learning experiences together.

We work in cross-functional, autonomous pods focussed on a specific product or common goal. Each pod is multi-disciplinary and usually consists of engineers, designers, data analysts and a product manager. They are self-organising and are free to adopt whatever processes and tools which help them execute their roadmap the best.

Logistics
Our interview process is a phone interview, a short coding task and a 1-2 hour follow up interview with the engineering team (via Google Meet). You’ll then have a chat with our CTO, to give you the chance to learn more about our mission, our history and culture at Atom.

We have a culture of respecting people’s time, so we’ll always aim to get back to you as quickly as possible and we’ll always provide feedback to help you understand any decisions we make.

We’re also not going to put you on the spot with any brain teasers or trick questions. We want you to feel comfortable being yourself and not on edge. Feel free to ask us ANYTHING, it’s just as important you get to know us as the other way around.

Commitment to Equal Opportunity
At Atom, diversity and inclusion is a priority, but also a necessity. To create a new standard for education across the world, we need a team of people with diverse perspectives so that we can challenge the status quo and reimagine learning experiences that work for everyone.

We're an equal opportunity employer that is committed to fostering an inclusive environment, where everyone can be themselves and have an impact. We encourage all applications irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, nationality, marital status, and disability.

We also aren’t too concerned about qualifications, or whether you’ve followed the “conventional path” to get here. In fact, we highly value experience from other industries and walks of life - so don’t hesitate to apply, even if you don’t think you meet the exact criteria in this job description, we can work with you on the rest!