I'm a passionate and vibrant yoga instructor. Breaking free from convention, I took a leap of faith and opened my own yoga studio, where I share my profound love for mindfulness and holistic well-being. I also extend my reach through my journal of thoughts, yoga practices, and how to make the world a better place.
Be part of a growing team, work on exciting projects and build a career with opportunities to learn, grow and succeed.
Role description and candidate brief
| Location | UK-based, remote-first. Brighton or commutable preferred -- see How we work together |
| Type | Permanent, full-time |
| Salary | £60,000 |
| Holiday | 31 days including bank holidays |
| Reports to | Chief Technology Officer |
| Checks | Right to work in the UK, criminal record self-declaration, online screening, and post-offer pre-employment checks (including an Official Enhanced DBS with Barred List Check) -- see Why UK-only. |
Gaia Learning runs Bloom, a live online education platform for young people with SEND and EHCPs. It's used by teachers, learners and school administrators, with guardian access coming.
Lessons are taught live in the browser -- video, a shared whiteboard, resources, attendance and an end-of-lesson review -- backed by learner profiles, objectives, safeguarding records and AI-assisted summarisation of documents and lesson outcomes.
We're past MVP and into production, working with schools and local authorities, iterating in sprints. The platform is small, modern and unusually well documented for its age. It now needs a senior engineer alongside the CTO to own it properly.
| You'll be the senior engineer on a production platform -- writing most of the code across the frontend, the API and the cloud infrastructure that runs them, and owning the quality bar for a product holding children's special category data. |
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role, not a management one. You'd take primary day-to-day ownership of the codebase and pipeline, and set the standards the rest of the work is held to.
If you want to be the person who knows the whole system end to end and is trusted to make architectural calls, this is that job. If you want a narrow ticket queue inside a large team, it isn't.
The product code. Full-stack feature work across a React and TypeScript single-page app and a PHP API. Most features touch both sides, so you'd design the API and build the interface that consumes it.
The infrastructure. Our cloud environments and the infrastructure-as-code that provisions them, with the security and data-residency controls a platform holding children's data requires.
The pipeline. Test-gated builds and deployments, and the alerting around them.
The quality bar. Testing, type safety, accessibility and security standards across the codebase. You'd set them, raise them where they need raising, and hold the rest of the work to them.
React and TypeScript on the front end, PHP on the back, MySQL, all running on Google Cloud in a UK region and managed as infrastructure-as-code. There's real-time collaboration and AI-assisted summarisation in the product.
You won't be expert in all of it on day one -- nobody is. We care that you can become expert in the parts you aren't, and we'll go through the architecture in detail at the technical stage.
| We build with Claude Code, and this role requires you to be genuinely on board with that. Our repository is set up for it -- guardrails, written architecture rules, an explicit definition of done -- and a meaningful share of our output comes through agentic workflows. It's not a side experiment; it's how a team this size ships at the pace we do. |
We're not looking for someone who'll tolerate it. We're looking for someone with their own workflow, real opinions about where these tools help and where they don't, and the discipline to review AI-written code as rigorously as a colleague's -- more so, because the failure modes are easier to miss.
Essential
Desirable
Not required
A degree, a particular set of prior employers, or a specific number of years. Show us you can build the thing well.
Small team, low ceremony, high standards. Sprints, a ClickUp backlog, PRs reviewed before merge, and a written Definition of Done: typecheck and build clean, backend tests green, style clean, authorisation covered, manual keyboard and accessibility pass on any changed UI.
Architecture rules are written down and enforced. You're welcome to argue with any of them, in writing, and change them. Documentation is part of the change, not a follow-up ticket.
Remote-first, UK-based. We'd like you within reach of Brighton, where you'd co-work with the CTO one or two days a week. Early-stage architecture benefits enormously from a whiteboard and a coffee, and this is the stage where that pays off most. If you're commutable rather than local, let's talk.
Bloom is built for schools and local authorities, so we're assessed before we're bought. Compliance isn't a separate function here -- it lands in the codebase and the infrastructure, and it would be part of this role.
We handle special category data about children under UK GDPR. Data residency, encryption, access control and auditability are enforced by policy rather than convention, and DPIAs, retention and lawful basis are live engineering constraints rather than paperwork. Our security work is shaped by ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials.
Accessibility matters here more than in most places -- our learners are the reason WCAG exists. An accessibility pass is part of our definition of done, and holding the platform to WCAG 2.2 AA is part of this role.
None of this is box-ticking. It's the reason schools let us near their learners.
Bloom holds special category data about children with SEND -- EHCPs, health information, safeguarding records. Everything is UK-hosted and pinned there by policy, and production access is tightly scoped.
This role involves production access, so it carries strict UK residency and right to work in the UK.
If any of these fundamental eligibility or safeguarding checks are a blocker for you, we'd rather know now than at offer stage.
It also sets the honest framing for the job: the consequence of sloppy work here isn't a bad sprint. We want someone who finds that motivating rather than intimidating.
We'll come back to everyone who applies.
Email Zaq Mughal (CTO): zaq@gaialearning.co.uk
Tell us one thing alongside your CV: how you actually use agentic coding tools day to day. Not the theory -- your workflow, and where you've found the limits.
| Gaia Learning is committed to building a team that reflects the communities Bloom serves. We welcome applications from everyone, and we're happy to make adjustments at any stage of the process -- just ask. |
Bloom enables schools to deliver live learning, track engagement, wellbeing, progress and support in real time. Helping schools intervene earlier, evidence impact and spend more time with pupils and less time on paperwork.
© Bloom - part of Gaia Learning. All Rights Reserved.
info@bloom.education
