Head of Engineering

At Studiosity, we are building the future ecosystem of learning.

Our mission is simple and clear: Raise the life-chances of students everywhere by providing a platform of tooling built atop our AI that supports learning.

Our proposition is simple: Utilise AI to support the student's learning journey, not to provide them with faster answers. Remember that the end goal of all education is to make humans better equipped for the world after schooling, and it isn't just a certification and accreditation hurdle.

With the Studiosity platform, educational institutions globally can raise student quality and outcomes by working within an evolving ecosystem of tooling that supports both student and educator directly. Our ethically and academically vetted platform now reaches nearly 2 million students across the global, including strong focuses on UK, USA, Canada, and the UAE - as well as our home turf of Australia and New Zealand.

The Education sector globally spends over $2bn per annum on learning support services, and Studiosity is the premium partner of choice amongst educational institutions. With a prestigious client base that includes some of the world's most well-known education institutions, Studiosity is ideally positioned to continue into another period of stellar growth.

Studiosity is entering a period of rapid scaling and is expanding our Engineering team, with plans to significantly increase the capacity over the next 2-5 year period. As part of the priming for that growth, we are seeking an exceptional Head of Engineering to lead the development and growth of the team.

This central role is pivotal to the company's growth, as well as its technical and commercial strategy. It will enable us to bring the experience we have across decades of working within hundreds of institutions to creating and developing a platform of tools.

You will join Studiosity's exceptional Product Development team and provide engineering leadership in the ongoing development of our market leading, generative AI powered education technology solutions.

The Head of Engineering is a key role for us, as you will be responsible for leadership of the Engineering Team and the development and maintenance of software that embodies the company strategy. To do this during a time of key growth means your hiring and architectural decisions will have huge impact on whether we are successful or not.

We are very proud of our software, it is the key to succeeding in our mission of increasing the life-chances of students everywhere.

You will drive the evolution of the platform to deliver seamless channels experiences, while preparing our platform for wider consumption as part of an emerging ecosystem.

This a role that requires you to remain somewhat hands-on with the code base (at least initially), while gradually growing the team size, culture, architecture and processes to allow us to develop our available bandwidth to produce software. Lead and manage a team of Architects & Engineers by providing strategic insight, facilitation, coaching and growth support.

Exceptional quality delivery of student and educator experiences from our AI platform is a key differentiator, and as such you will be involved in understanding and evolving what that strategy means, and making it a reality.

To be clear, this is a role that works on AI, not just with AI.

To succeed in this position you will be a seasoned engineering leader possessing extensive experience (10+ years) of contemporary SaaS Engineering. You will have developed your skills within a company that has pursued a platform strategy of multiple products, and ideally has also engaged in developing an ecosystem of 2nd party and 3rd party value creation and exchange.

You will have strong opinions about technical direction and what 'excellent' really looks like at scale.

Specifically you bring:

• Proven Culture and Team Leadership: Proven experience leading engineering teams of unique and complex personality types, all in a distributed environment (across the same time-zone). You will lead and mentor engineers and ultimately, as we grow, also engineering managers to build their skills.
• Commercial acumen: All our leaders need to understand the commercial landscape and viability risk of their products, and how every choice made relates back to their ultimate purpose of bringing more people to the platform.
• Strategic thinking - an ability to look past the delivery of a feature and to the longer term strategy of the company. We are solving the problems of an entire industry that is vital and core to the future of learning.
• Crispy communication skills: Our AI powered platform is rife with complexity, and being able to explain the unexplainable is what sets you aside from the competition and builds alignment with all the crafts.

In terms of knowledge and experience, we seek:

• Deep Technical Leadership in building enterprise grade distributed systems. Proven experience in large, AI-centric back ends would be helpful. You will define and own the technical direction of the entire company.
• A focus on User-centric design: A key part of our differentiation is within the delivery of the output of our AI backend. Developing intuitive and seamless experiences and services is key to success. An opinion on how AI is evolving the meaning of the interface between UX and Front end would be welcomed.
• A focus on Reliability and Scale: developing our product silos into a viable platform and ecosystem play will require that we take scale and reliability up a whole level. Knowing what this means is a core requirement for the role.
• Understanding of Ethical AI: Studiosity is positioned as "AI for Learning, not Answers", and as a leader in that area, we would like you to understand what Ethical AI is, and how it is practically demonstrated and deployed to meet societal and regulatory expectations.
• Large language model familiarity: For all lleaders in an AI first company, we require comprehension of, and exposure to large language models and their deployment at scale. To be clear, this is a role working on an AI powered output, not just with AI tooling.
• Proficiency in Cloud Computing: Like all managers in a SaaS company, we expect you to understand Cloud computing, it's terminology and ways of working. Cloud architecture, scalability and deployment models are key to making a platform and ecosystem strategy successful.

We might be biased, but we think Studiosity is an amazing place to work. In addition to our noble purpose of increasing life chances for students, we benefit from a low ego, non-corporate and lifestyle-friendly work ethic and culture. These are complemented by an exceptional passion and drive for lifelong learning in which everyone stays results-driven and proud of the work we deliver every day.

To express your interest please forward a thoughtful cover letter accompanied by your current resume. Thanks for your consideration and we look forward to hearing from you.