Product Engineer

High level stuff you might be filtering against 🔍

Location: Remote (CT/ET Timezone). Collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe, alongside building out a new hub in Chicago.

Type: Full-time

Salary: Location dependent. As a guide, our current range across all levels is $130k-$190k. We are open to negotiation as we recognise there are different situations, but these are our general guardrails.

What I am looking for

👋 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.

This role is particularly exciting because you’ll be one of Zen’s first Product Engineers in the US, where we’re enjoying rapid growth. You’ll thrive in this role if you’re someone who can build relationships quickly, take ownership of problems end-to-end and help grow a team around you 💪

What we are building and why

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 $65 million globally 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 😉

What the role looks like in practice

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