Frontend Developer

Why you should be excited about joining?

• To work for a company that has the ability to drive positive social change on a global scale.
• To form part of the core engineering team of one of the most unique EdTech businesses in London.
• To join a team that truly care about building a product that users love to use and that brings value to them.
• To have the ability to own the tech decisions for frontend
• The chance to transition a product to the latest frontend technology and tools – React, Typescript, ES6.
• Constant learning is encouraged, whether that be taking time to research into new technologies and contribute to Open Source, or more formal training and certification.

Company Overview

Background

Since our inception in 2013, Third Space Learning have been supporting teachers by delivering online one-to-one maths tuition as part of the school timetable. We have worked with hundreds of UK primary schools, thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of pupils, delivering over 700,000 hours of online tuition.

We are a team of teachers, parents and technologists, based in London and Sri Lanka, who all understand both the emotional and academic value of one-to-one tuition across all social groups.

Mission

We want every student to be able to access great quality online tuition to help them succeed in, and love, their learning.

We are proud of our positive social impact:

Current Snapshot

TSL are currently a team of 40 in London, and over 300 across India and Sri Lanka. We’re growing quickly — doubling revenue last year to £3m — and we’ve raised £7.5m in funding to scale our business.

Product Overview

Third Space Learning (TSL) is geared towards schools that want additional support in KS2 Maths tutoring. We’re used by over 700 primary schools and 7,000 pupils each week. We’re the largest provider of 1-to-1 maths interventions in the UK.

TSL for Parents offers affordable, fun and effective 1-to-1 KS2 Maths tutoring direct to the pupil, paid for and managed by parents. As you may imagine, this has been of immense value during these challenging times.

We also have a popular resource hub called MathsHub (https://mathshub.thirdspacelearning.com/). This offers high-quality maths teaching resources for teachers and parents, alongside continuous professional development resources for primary teachers.

Engineering

Team Ethos

Our main goal at TSL is building a delightful and reliable product for all our users. TSL is the place for you if you care about the product you build and the impact it can have on users. You should enjoy the challenge of building a product that users love.

Our product engineering team are pragmatists when it comes to technology. We make the most of what we have and we innovate when needed. We don’t put tech above the needs of our users. 

• Because we have a small experienced team, we can be truly user centric. Super-fast iteration to prototype features and validate user feedback is key (and fun).
• We take pride in our We truly believe in the product we’re building and the social impact it will have on a global scale.
• We work collaboratively to solve problems. We focus on picking the best tool for the job and have a real appreciation for what every team member brings.
• We care about our standards. We’re passionate about delivery, and shipping quality code every day.
• We thrive on the principles of autonomy, ownership and mastery.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: JavaScript, React, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Next.js, SASS, jQuery
• Backend: Ruby on Rails, SideKiq, WebRTC (Janus), Elixir
• Cloud/DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, DataDog, Papertrail

Your Role

Reporting to the CTO, you will work closely with marketing, UX and the product managers to design and develop brand new features across our suite of applications. You will also work alongside our talented Senior Frontend Engineer, ensuring frontend decisions and approach are consistent.

Your focus

For the remainder of 2020 and into next year, you will probably be focusing on one of two areas: tutor experience and our virtual classroom.

Tutor Experience

We are currently building backend tutoring services for a global partner that provides a “homework help” solution for English speaking students globally. Our expert tutors will help these students solve their problems initially via chat, instead of the standard TSL model (audio and virtual classroom).

You’ll be picking up an initial product built to high standards by a contractor who will be available to handover his work. You’ll work with the PM, the partner and the rest of the product team.

This involves:

• Integrating with the third party’s chat platform
• Building a really slick UX for the tutors, helping the tutors solve their problems in a time restricted environment
• Building the tutor lobby, where tutors select the problems they solve and own them.

Virtual Classroom

We have started on a journey to redesign the virtual classroom that sits between students and tutors. It’s currently a React app that has been improved over the last 12 months but needs some dedicated focus that we now feel able to give it.

You’ll be working alongside the existing schools team, a PM and our head of design.

Our goals for the Virtual Classroom are ambitious:

• Most importantly, an engaging, delightful experience for students aged from 6-16. Working 1:1 with a great tutor should feel inspirational.
• Support for tablet and mobile browsers.
• Effortless tutoring for our talented tutors.

About You

• You deeply empathise with our users and the social impact of the product. You are building a product for often non-technical users, including primary school age children. Each has different needs, so being able to align to the user is essential.
• You are a true team player, with solid experience of improving the quality of consumer-focused applications in an agile, fast-paced environment. You are hungry for delivering a delightful user experience, shipping high quality software every day on a CI/CD environment, and are keen on making progress individually — as well as on improving team, product and business performance.
• You are a doer, who’ll get stuck in and make things happen.
• You enjoy solving difficult problems, but you are pragmatic, and you understand the need for trade-offs depending on the current needs of the business and product.
• You know how to analyse problems with software, and you love to experiment and prototype based on real time customer feedback.

Required skills

• Commercial experience building applications with React, and JavaScript or TypeScript.
• Building modern responsive web UIs.
• Able to collaborate with the business, marketing and UX teams on technical and product discussions in a positive and insightful way.
• A pragmatic approach to development - knowing when a solution is good enough.
• A broad understanding of the frontend ecosystem (e.g. npm, Webpack, HTML, CSS, etc).
• Able to advise and make technical decisions relating to frontend architecture and development.
• Happy to work in an agile development process.

Nice to haves

• You’ve worked in the Education sector
• Experience with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and/or Test Automation.
• Experience working with Ruby on Rails.
• Experience working with PixiJS, HTML5 or WebGL.

What will career progression look like for you?

• You will have an awesome opportunity to set the agenda for frontend architecture in a company and product that needs to provide the highest level of user experience. We have a great track record of listening to our engineers when making these decisions and you will have a seat at the table when that happens.
• You’ll work closely with our Head of Design, to ensure we stay at the leading edge of consumer and school focused web and mobile applications.
• In terms of your next role, in 2021 the team will likely split into 3 teams, this will give the opportunity to move into a Senior Frontend role for one of the teams.

Package and Benefits

• Salary: £55,000 - £70,000
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Flexible working arrangements (time and location)
• Personal development budget and Perkbox
• Spacious office
• Vitality healthcare with
  • 50% off Virgin Gym
  • Bi-weekly free cinema tickets
  • Free weekly coffee at Starbucks
• Pension contribution (statutory)
• Budget for self-learning and training
• Lovely location, team, and regular good times

Interview Process

Two stage interview process. 1. Phone/Video 30-45 min. 2. Final stage - coding test, design challenge and cultural interview.