Product Engineer (Remote - EMEA)

High level stuff you might be filtering against 🔍

Location: Remote (UK timezone ±6 hrs generally).

Type: Full-time

Salary: Location dependent. As a reference, our current range in the UK across all levels is £75k to £110k. If you will work from another location, you should map this to your equivalent market rate to be competitive. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.

👋 Hi, I’m Martin, Chief Technology Officer 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 25 Product Engineers working in small dynamic teams across the Zen product.

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 💪

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 £50 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 😉

II’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 picked up an AI teacher qualification project that started out quite loosely defined, with no clear owner or scope. I spent time aligning with Product and Ops to clarify what problem we were solving, shaped an initial approach, and started delivering iterative improvements so we could test value quickly. Along the way I helped reset direction when momentum dipped.” - Arindam

"I spent the week working on a major overhaul of our permissions system — moving away from hardcoded roles towards something granular and scoped per school, network, and unit. I also wired up audit logging around sensitive actions so we have proper traceability in production, and built out an admin UI so non-engineers can manage roles and permissions without needing to come to us." - João

“I spent the week creating a foundational agents.md configuration for our monorepo to help us use AI more effectively when building product and writing code. I worked alongside the AI working group to support some of the bottlenecks we’ve been seeing in our development process, and made the setup clear and practical so other engineers could start using it straight away.” - Eimi

“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 the week upgrading our React Native app to the latest Expo SDK. This meant updating dependencies, fixing compatibility issues, and resolving build and runtime problems to keep everything stable. The upgrade puts us on a supported version, reduces future maintenance risk, and gives us access to new tools that will help us ship features faster.”- Ethan

“I spent time this week improving the anonymisation logic in Ditto - our internal tool for cloning production databases safely for development. I also put together the weekly DevEx metrics for the Product and Tech team, covering things like CI pass rates and deployment frequency. Then towards the end of the week I did some work addressing minor vulnerabilities that were found from our monthly red-teaming with CovertSwarm.” - Jai

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 as well as investigating AI for bug triaging.

Process serves performance. We work in a Mission-based setup where teams form around outcomes not org charts, unnecessary process or following rules. That means you won't be stuck in a lane - you'll work across different parts of the business based on your strengths and interests. 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. And we’ll encourage you to propose (and lead) Missions that propel the business forward.

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.

Your manager is a partner, not a supervisor. You'll have a manager, but they won't be directing your every move. Expect them to help you think through hard problems, offer perspective, and provide nudges to help you grow - not to tell you what to do or check your work. That means you'll need to take ownership of your own progress and speak up when you need unblocking.

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. There will be lots of frontline teams in-office though providing a fast way to build context on problems to solve by seeing them firsthand.

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.

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 parts of the product 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 4 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 CPO, Dan, 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 our Senior Engineering Manager, Sean. I’ll be wanting to understand how you think and approach the role and engineering excellence, and Sean will give you some insight about what it’s like to be a Product Engineer at Zen. 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.

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 😉