Were looking for a confident and flexible software engineer to join the micro:bit Educational Foundation as the Tech Lead for our websites and services. Youll be responsible for the development, deployment and maintenance of our systems and web presence at https://microbit.org. This site is already the first port of call for millions of students and teachers around the world who are learning about coding and technology using the BBC micro:bit. The role will require you to work with a range of languages and tools; we need someone who can start with what we have and lead the creation of our next generation platform. Alongside this you will start to develop our code hosting and sharing solutions, community portals, and ecosystem listings. Each of these sites already have people managing their content, and this is a technical role that includes working on the tools and workflows to make authoring, publishing and organising the information easier. You will be joining a small organisation at an early stage, and this means there is loads of scope to decide how we support teachers and students, define the services we provide and how theyre delivered, and shape the micro:bit experience.
This is a full-time role in the micro:bit Educational Foundation. Were looking for someone to join the foundation and build the product over the long term, including hiring a team. Team size: initially 1 – you would report in to our CTO, and we plan for the person filling this role to hire another (probably more junior) web infrastructure or frontend engineer in Q3 2017. Location: This is a remote position, but hosting in office-space in London, Cambridge or Oxford is a possibility if so desired. The rest of the team also works remotely, though we get together face-to-face roughly every month, usually in London.
Benefits
We are a UK-based not-for-profit organisation with the global vision of helping every child to be an inventor. We are enabling children around the world to get creative with technology and invent in school, in clubs and at home! The micro:bit is a handheld, fully programmable computer that has already been given to every Year 7 child across the UK. Our mission in the foundation is to take the hardware, and the magical end-to-end experience provided by the online micro:bit editors, and make it available around the rest of the world. One of the greatest benefits of working at micro:bit is knowing that the work you’re doing is contributing to something positive, constructive and with beneficial social outcomes.
All micro:bit Foundation employees may optionally use one (paid!) day per week to go and run activities with micro:bits in schools, clubs and tech camps, or to use micro:bit for outreach projects, demos, and examples.
We aim to be a responsible downstream of the open source software projects that are used to build the micro:bit: much like a good Linux distribution collates, tests, stabilises and releases combinations of many diverse open source packages, the micro:bit Educational Foundation and the micro:bit community present micro:bit users with a stable, tested release of all the things you need to make the unique and productive end-to-end micro:bit experience. Were a small organisation with a large audience and reach. We thrive on creative problem solving and are open to new ideas and solutions. This gives each individual the chance to have enormous impact, as well as ensuring that your days will be diverse and the challenges complex.
