Backend Software Engineer

Why apply?

• 🌍 Real-world impact: Your work will directly help thousands of young students to learn more effectively. Building new features and fine-tuning existing to improve the student learning experience and provide better insights to schools and teachers.
• 🚀 Working at pace: Skye began as a prototype two years ago, first tested in schools last year and Skye now helps over 5,000 pupils in the UK and US. Our intention is to grow 4x in the next year becoming the market leader in effective spoken AI tutoring. 
• 🌟 Autonomy and ownership: You’ll have space to experiment, lead initiatives, and shape how AI is built into our platform.
• 🤩 Collaborative team: You’ll join a talented, passionate group of educators, product managers and engineers who care deeply about both technology (how we build product) and impact (how it solves real problems for our users).
• 🌱 VC Backed: Backed by top VCs, we've already hit our revenue goal for Skye this year. Our latest investment will be used to further improve the product, expand into new markets and achieve profitability in the next three years.

Company Overview 

Here at Third Space Learning, our mission is to ensure every student is able to access great quality online tuition. 

For too long, tutoring has been the preserve of a fortunate minority. We address that by working in partnership with schools to provide additional weekly one to one maths tutoring to the pupils who need it most. We are doing this through the delivery of one-to-one, high dosage maths tutoring sessions with our AI tutor, Skye.

We have worked with 25%+ of schools in the UK and we are just getting started in the US. The scale of the problem we seek to solve is significant; there are 11 million disadvantaged students in the US, 1.7 million disadvantaged students in the UK, and millions more in English speaking markets globally.

Product Overview  

Our product is unique. In the EdTech market, the majority of tutoring products are B2C marketplaces for consumers to find and contact tutors, at a price point that most schools can’t afford. Then more cost-effective AI tools are typically text-based and designed for motivated learners. Evidence shows that this is not suitable for the vast majority of students. Very few other companies have built their own lessons and learning pathways for pupils to follow, let alone one delivered via an affordable, AI tutor. 

We have an academic team of curriculum content creators, building programmes that are delivered by Skye in our proprietary virtual classroom. Skye is a proactive, reasoning-driven tutor. Built on custom-built prompts, tools and agentic reasoning, Skye delivers a personalised, spoken tutoring session to pupils in their classroom.

 We are leading the change in the shift towards conversation-based AI tuition, and have big ambitions for the next two years: improving the efficacy of what we’ve already built and scaling across the UK and USA. It’s an exciting time to join the team. 

About the Role

We’re looking for a Mid/Senior Software Engineer who loves building fast, experimenting often, and pushing what’s possible. You’ll work to improve our core AI tutor - a proactive multi-agent model - and supporting technology (test suite, content creation tool, curriculum architecture). We’re two years in to developing Skye and have big plans for the coming years, so we’re looking for someone who can get stuck in and help us move fast.

Tech Stack: Node.js, AWS API Gateway/EKS/Step Functions, React, TypeScript, Langgraph, Langchain, gpt-oss, AWS.

What You’ll Do

• Build and scale backend services in JavaScript to improve the core functionality of our AI voice tutor.
• Work hands-on with large language models — fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying them in real products.
• Design and run large-scale data and model experiments to improve outcomes.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, data, and academic teams to turn ideas into impactful features.
• Help shape our engineering culture, tooling, and architecture as we grow.

Requirements

Technical skills needed

• Solid backend experience (Javascript, APIs, data pipelines).
• Proven experience as a software engineer working in a startup or product company.
• Comfortable working with large datasets and distributed systems.
• Familiar with practical applications of LLMs: prompting, evaluation, and how to fine-tune or adapt models for specific tasks.
• An added bonus: Experience with transcription, speech-to-text / text-to-speech, or voice-based AI interactions (our product sends live audio via a websocket, so experience in this area would also help).
• Comfortable with advanced debugging:  Handles complex debugging scenarios that may involve multiple systems or applications.
• Design Patterns: able to apply standard design patterns to solve common architectural problems, enhancing code efficiency and scalability.
• Able to participate in code reviews, providing constructive feedback and sharing best practices.
• Test Automation: Implements automation strategies for repetitive testing tasks to improve efficiency and consistency.

Soft skills we look for

• Analytical: able to tackle complex problems using a systematic and logical approach.
• Influential: use experience and knowledge to positively influence peers and project outcomes. 
• Decisive: make informed and timely decisions, especially under pressure.
• Reliable: consistently delivers quality work and follows through on commitments.
• Curious, experimental mindset: you like to test ideas quickly and learn from the data.
• Good communicator: will proactively communicate, can express their opinions clearly 
• Resilient and adaptable: Manages setbacks effectively and remains positive. Able to adapt when plans change.
• Organised: can move through work methodically, documenting decisions and organising your time so as to deliver on time.
• Motivated by delivering impact: After a few months, you can work independently to add real and meaningful value to the product we're building. You don’t need to wait for instruction, and if you have an idea or suggestion that you think will improve how we work or what we're building, you’ll proactively voice it.

Benefits

• £70,000-90,000 (flexible depending on experience)
• Twice yearly development reviews.
• Flexible working arrangements. Our engineering team work remote first, typically coming into the office once a month.
• Office just off vibrant Brick Lane
• Optional Bupa dental care and Vitality healthcare
• Pension contribution (3%)
• A lovely team and in person social events.