Technical Lead
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At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better.
We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn't mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day.
Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 7,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days.
At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren't just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.
We are looking for an experienced and collaborative Technical Lead to join our Engineering team and take ownership of system and solution design to ensure our products are robust, scalable, and secure. The remit and focus of the role is to mentor and coach engineers, embed a culture of quality, and help the team make sound technical decisions that deliver real value to customers. It's a broad and exciting role, so we're looking for someone up for a challenge - if you're communicative and a good team player, this is the role for you.
Core responsibilities
- Define and guide system architecture, balancing trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security
- Work actively with the architecture community to define processes, drive technology adoption, and share best practices across teams
- Ensure non-functional requirements, performance, reliability, scalability, and security are addressed in all solution designs
- Champion accountability from design through production by ensuring systems are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Lead Root Cause Analysis when issues occur
- Lead estimation and feasibility assessments, making sure plans are realistic and aligned with team skills and capacity
- Contribute to structured release planning and communication, ensuring phased rollouts deliver value early (MVP-first). Support post-release reviews and retrospectives
- Uphold coding standards and promote automated testing while embedding a quality-first culture in the development process
- Identify and prioritise maintenance and technical debt, making its impact visible by translating it into customer and business outcomes
- Extensive experience with PHP
- Extensive software engineering experience on complex, scalable systems
- Strong grounding in engineering principles and design patterns (e.g. SOLID, DRY)
- Proficiency with relational databases and data modelling, including schema design, query tuning and data management
- Proven ability to design and deliver solutions using service-oriented or microservice architectures, including well-structured APIs
- Hands-on experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Working knowledge of a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure or GCP)
- Familiarity with observability practices - monitoring, metrics and alerting - plus incident/problem management and Root Cause Analysis
Bonus skills
- Experience with enterprise-scale or high-availability systems
- Agile facilitation (Scrum/Kanban) and continuous improvement
- Exposure to DevOps/SRE practices (infrastructure as code, performance tuning, capacity planning)
The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you'll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:
- A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
- 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
- Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at careers@arbor-education.com.
Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice.
Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation
Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.
Refer a friend
Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: careers@arbor-education.com
Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.