It infrastructure manager jobs in Leeds, west yorkshire

Who we are

IPSEA (Independent Provider of Special Education Advice) is a national charity working to ensure that children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) receive the educational support they are legally entitled to. Since we were formed in 1983, we have helped to improve the education experience of thousands of children and young people across England. We do this by providing free and independent legal advice and casework support for families, undertaking policy work and delivering training on the SEND legal framework.

What you’ll do

Reports to: Chief Executive

Location: Home-based or Hybrid (with frequent travel for events and meeting with parliamentarians and other stakeholders) 

We are seeking a Policy Manager to lead IPSEA's policy and influencing work to achieve positive change for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their families. Working closely with the Chief Executive, Head of Legal and Training, trustees and colleagues across the organisation, you will set strategic policy priorities and develop evidence-based influencing plans that support IPSEA's mission and long-term objectives.

Drawing on insights from our advice and tribunal services, legal expertise and the experiences of families, you will identify systemic issues within the SEND system and develop policy solutions that improve children and young people's access to the support and education to which they are entitled. You will ensure that IPSEA's policy positions are credible, legally robust and informed by the lived experiences of those we support.

You will lead IPSEA's engagement with government, Parliament and other key decision-makers, identifying opportunities to influence legislation, policy and practice at both national and local level. This includes overseeing responses to consultations, parliamentary inquiries and calls for evidence, as well as preparing briefings and strategic advice to support senior-level engagement and advocacy.

Working collaboratively with colleagues across legal, communications, fundraising and training teams, you will ensure IPSEA's policy, campaigning and public affairs activities are aligned and maximise the organisation's impact. You will also monitor developments across the political, legal and policy landscape, helping IPSEA respond proactively to emerging opportunities and challenges affecting the rights of children and young people with SEND.

This role offers the opportunity to make a real difference as part of a small, friendly, and dedicated team. If you are passionate about helping children and young people with SEND and have the skills and experience needed, we would love to hear from you.

Who are we looking for?

You will have significant experience in a senior policy and campaigning/public affairs role and have good knowledge of local and national government structure including the legislative process.

You the ability to build and maintain relationships with a range of stakeholders including MPs, civil servants, campaigners and parents. You exhibit tact and diplomacy and can be impactful with people of varying levels and experience.

Your research and critical thinking skills enable you to analyse policy and data to produce relevant reports and position papers. You have experience of drafting organisation responses to government consultations and parliamentary calls for evidence.

IPSEA should also reflect the communities we support. We would particularly like to hear from candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds, LGBTQIA+ people, under-served communities and disabled people, as well as those with lived experience of the SEND system, either as a child or as a parent/carer.

What we can offer you

• 5% employer pension contributions
• Healthcare cash plan
• Flexible working arrangements
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays plus an additional day off for your birthday (pro-rata if part-time).

To apply

Visit our website to download a recruitment pack and application form.

Deadline for applications: 9am on 7 September 2026.

First-round interviews: on 15 September 2026 in our offices in Takeley, Essex, with second-round interviews (online) on 18 September 2026.

NO AGENCIES PLEASE.

Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML)

Remote (UK-based) | Full-time | Flexible working | salary £82,409 + benefits including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML) to help us build beautifully simple, high-impact digital products that support teachers and improve outcomes for pupils across the UK.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We're a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)

• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact

• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

💡 About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer (AI/ML) to join our AI Platform team.

Oak's AI Platform team builds and maintains our core AI infrastructure, including shared services, prompt libraries and reusable pipelines. This is essential in enabling our product squads to deliver safe, effective and scalable AI features that support teachers and pupils across the UK.

You'll take a leading role in shaping Oak's AI Platform, contributing towards the technical direction for reliable, safe and scalable AI capabilities. You'll work with product squads to turn ambiguous problems into robust solutions, provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, and help establish the patterns, tooling and standards that enable responsible AI delivery across Oak.

You'll work across the boundary between machine learning and software engineering: taking the same ownership of production reliability, testing and developer experience as other senior engineers on the team, while keeping safety and responsible AI at the centre of what you build.

In this role, you may work on:

• Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including context chunking, prompt construction and implementing strategies to improve relevance and accuracy.

• Optimising embedding and vector similarity systems through semantic search, clustering, filtering logic and dimensionality reduction techniques.

• Supporting model evaluation and safety tooling, such as automated test harnesses, hallucination detection, content moderation and input guardrails.

• Contributing to model fine-tuning, prompting and deployment, with a focus on balancing performance, accuracy and cost-effectiveness.

🔧 What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the continuous improvement of Oak's machine learning models and systems, from prototype through to production at scale.

• Develop and maintain highly performant ed-tech applications that are secure, scalable, highly available and accessible to the widest number of users, meeting Government Digital Service standards.

• Be an expert authority within the engineering team on the architecture, code base and AI/ML best practices, providing mentorship to less experienced colleagues.

• Design and coordinate the integration of AI/ML models with existing Oak systems, ensuring robust model serving and end-to-end testing.

• Take responsibility for the operation and reliability of production services you build — monitoring performance, resolving issues, and addressing capacity constraints before they affect users.

• Lead the implementation of new processes or tools that improve the user or developer experience.

• As a member of the Oak team, contribute to the planning and culture of the organisation.

• Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.

• Deputise for more senior colleagues and take on other general responsibilities as required.

🌱 What We're Looking For

• 5+ years' experience leading the continuous improvement of machine learning models and systems in production, alongside significant experience architecting and building high-performing web applications with modern JavaScript libraries and tools.

• Extensive knowledge of machine learning frameworks and cloud-based machine learning tools, with experience moving models from development to production.

• Understanding of machine learning ethics, fairness frameworks and responsible AI principles, including bias detection and privacy-preserving data practices.

• Experience building evaluation frameworks and automated test harnesses for AI/ML systems from scratch. Including techniques for detecting hallucinations, measuring output quality, and monitoring model performance and safety in production.

• Proven experience proposing and implementing new processes or tools that improve developer experience and lead to higher quality products.

• Experience collaborating with product teams to lead the development of high-quality, high-impact products, with great communication and collaborative skills.

💛 Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working — we'll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

🌈 Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors.

If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but don't meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.

📌 Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we're unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: We'll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.

Next steps

You'll answer a few admin questions and some questions related to your day-to-day job. Your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans), so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.

If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview across three stages. We're aiming to start interviews the week beginning 17th August 2026.

Stage 1: An introductory call to learn more about your skills and experience, and a chance for you to ask us about the role. This takes about 30 minutes.

Stage 2: A technical interview over Zoom, combining a hands-on pairing session or technical walk-through, followed by some technical interview questions. This takes around two hours.

Stage 3: A collaboration interview, focused on how you work with both engineering and non-engineering colleagues. This takes about 1 hour.

We love giving feedback, so at the end of the application process, we'll share our assessment of your performance.

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, don't leave it too long to avoid missing out.

We are an equal opportunity employer.

We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.

Finance Director  
22.5 hours per week (3 days) 
Salary: £37,800 per annum 
(Equivalent to approximately £63,000 full-time) 
Based in Leeds with flexible and hybrid working 

Advonet is an independent advocacy charity supporting people who may find it difficult to be heard, ensuring their rights are upheld and their voices are at the centre of decisions that affect their lives. 

We are seeking an experienced, qualified finance professional to join our Senior Leadership Team as Finance Director . This is a strategic role that combines financial leadership with oversight of IT, systems, data infrastructure and organisational resilience. 

Working closely with the CEO, Head of Business Development and Finance Manager, you will help ensure Advonet remains financially sustainable, well-managed and prepared for the future. Alongside responsibility for financial planning, governance, risk management, audit and Board reporting, you will lead work to strengthen our digital infrastructure, cyber resilience, data protection arrangements and organisational systems. 

This role will suit someone who enjoys operating at a strategic level, bringing clear judgement, constructive challenge and practical leadership. We are particularly interested in hearing from qualified accountants who have experience of supporting organisational change, overseeing systems and infrastructure, and working with senior leaders and trustees. 

Why join us? 

• Senior Leadership Team role reporting directly to the CEO 

• Opportunity to shape Advonet’s financial, digital and organisational future 

• Flexible and hybrid working 

• Up to 31 days annual leave plus bank holidays 

• Generous pension contribution 

• Health cashback plan and employee support scheme 

• Friendly, values-led and inclusive culture 

Key dates 

• Applications open: Monday 20 July 

• Closing date: Monday 17 August at 12 noon 

• Shortlisting: Friday 21 August 

• Interviews: Thursday 10 September in Leeds 

How to apply 

Please submit: 

• A CV 

• A covering letter of no more than 500 words explaining how you meet the requirements of the role and why you would be a good fit for Advonet 

• A completed diversity monitoring form

For an informal conversation about the role, please contact Angela Ellis, Chief Executive Officer. 

About the role 
This is a senior leader role which will lead the development and maintenance of the charity’s  digital platforms and internal infrastructure, ensuring that we create the best possible experience  for our users. This will include oversight of our internal IT systems: our Salesforce CRM, the Hub virtual  learning environment for pupils, tutors and teachers on our programmes, and the Tutor Zone onboarding platform for our tutors. The role will require working closely with colleagues across the  organisation to ensure that the technology developments are well planned and fit with the needs  of the charity. You will manage a small technology team including web developers and  Salesforce administrators, alongside managing our external IT support provider. You will champion  the charity’s values and embody them in interactions with colleagues. You will be willing to learn  and have a can-do attitude. 

The role requires a driven and focused leader, with experience in managing the development of  software. They will be an experienced technology professional, with a proven track record in  scoping and managing technology projects, ensuring information security, and maintaining a  keen interest in emerging technologies and industry trends. Candidates for this role should be  comfortable working in a busy, efficient and high-performing team. 

This is a great opportunity to join The Brilliant Club Team at a time when we are moving into the  delivery of our new Backing Brilliance strategy, where technology is one of our key enablers. The  previous Join the Club strategy saw us invest heavily in technology including the development of  new pupil (the Hub) and tutor (Tutor Zone) platforms. The focus is now ensuring that platforms are  engaging, accessible and well-maintained, our IT systems are secure, and we continue to keep  pace with the evolving picture of technology including AI to ensure we build efficiencies and  develop automations to commit to time back to mission.  We are excited to meet candidates who want to join us on this journey.

About you 
The role will best suit someone who 

• Essential – Experience managing the full lifecycle of technology projects, from discovery  and requirements gathering through to implementation and evaluation. 
• Essential – Experience leading the design, development and continuous improvement of  digital products and services. 
• Essential – Experience working with software developers, including sprint planning, user  testing and delivery 
• Essential – Agile project management experience/qualification 
• Essential – Experience leading the implementation, rollout and adoption of new technology  platforms and systems 
• Essential – Extensive experience of using CRM software 
• Essential – Ability to communicate complex technical information clearly to both technical  and non-technical audiences 
• Essential – Excellent verbal and written communication skills 
• Essential – Excellent data handling skills, including data quality and reporting 
• Essential – High level of attention to detail and organisational skills 
• Essential – Experience developing and managing product roadmaps and backlogs,  balancing organisational priorities with user needs 
• Desirable – Knowledge and experience of using Salesforce CRM 
• Desirable – Knowledge of IT support and infrastructure 
• Desirable – Worked in the education sector, e.g. school, university, education programme  delivery 
• Essential – adhere to information security policies included in the charity’s ISO 27001 manual  and complete information security training 
• Has a demonstrable passion for furthering The Brilliant Club’s mission