Platform Technical Lead

Overview

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.

We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

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 blends deep technical expertise with leadership, embedding a culture of quality and reliability, and guiding the team in making sound technical decisions. This is a broad and exciting role for someone who is highly technical and proactive.

• Architectural Leadership: Define and guide system architecture, balancing trade-offs between speed, scalability, maintainability, and security to meet business goals
• Reliability and Performance: Champion accountability from design through to production by ensuring systems are observable and meet agreed Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Drive continuous improvement in platform reliability, performance, and efficiency
• Automation: Drive automation initiatives across the team to reduce operational toil and improve system efficiency
• Technical Standards: Uphold coding standards, promote automated testing, and work with the architecture community to drive technology adoption and share best practices across teams. Ensure production readiness standards for all services
• Planning and Delivery: Lead technical estimation and feasibility assessments, ensuring plans are realistic and aligned with team capacity. Contribute to structured release planning and support post-release reviews
• Mentorship and Coaching: Mentor and coach engineers through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and motivation. Foster alignment and help the team galvanise around technical solutions and goals
• Collaboration: Work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and other engineers to align technical direction with product strategy. Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• About you
• Experience:
  
  Extensive professional experience in SRE, Dev Ops, or Platform Engineering on complex, scalable systems
• Cloud Systems:
  Extensive expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures
• Platform Scale:
  Proven experience operating platforms serving a high volume of requests (approximately 1000 req/sec)
• Infrastructure as Code:
  Advanced proficiency with Terraform and configuration management tools
• Scripting:
  Strong skills in Python, Go, or a similar language for automation and tooling
• Programming:
  Experience in PHP; preferably in a significantly sized object-oriented codebase
• Observability:
  Deep experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., Data Dog, Prometheus, or equivalent), plus incident/problem management
• System Design:
  Expert understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and resilience patterns
• Containerisation:
  Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)
• CI/CD:
  Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments
• Leadership:
  Demonstrated ability in mentoring and supporting the growth of fellow engineers, experience organizing and driving team work streams
• AI and productivity:
  Experience using AI, or an interest in increasing productivity with new tooling including generative AI

• Experience with chaos engineering and reliability testing
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks
• Background in agile and lean methodologies (Scrum/Kanban)
• Contributions to open-source projects or the SRE community
• Experi…