Actively Interviewing
This organisation is scheduling interviews as applications come in. They're ready to hire as soon as they find the right person. Don't miss your opportunity, apply now!
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:
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Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)
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Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact
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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:
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Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including context chunking, prompt construction and implementing strategies to improve relevance and accuracy.
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Optimising embedding and vector similarity systems through semantic search, clustering, filtering logic and dimensionality reduction techniques.
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Supporting model evaluation and safety tooling, such as automated test harnesses, hallucination detection, content moderation and input guardrails.
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Contributing to model fine-tuning, prompting and deployment, with a focus on balancing performance, accuracy and cost-effectiveness.
🔧 What You'll Be Doing
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Lead the continuous improvement of Oak's machine learning models and systems, from prototype through to production at scale.
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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.
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Be an expert authority within the engineering team on the architecture, code base and AI/ML best practices, providing mentorship to less experienced colleagues.
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Design and coordinate the integration of AI/ML models with existing Oak systems, ensuring robust model serving and end-to-end testing.
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Take responsibility for the operation and reliability of production services you build — monitoring performance, resolving issues, and addressing capacity constraints before they affect users.
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Lead the implementation of new processes or tools that improve the user or developer experience.
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As a member of the Oak team, contribute to the planning and culture of the organisation.
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Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.
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Deputise for more senior colleagues and take on other general responsibilities as required.
🌱 What We're Looking For
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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.
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Extensive knowledge of machine learning frameworks and cloud-based machine learning tools, with experience moving models from development to production.
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Understanding of machine learning ethics, fairness frameworks and responsible AI principles, including bias detection and privacy-preserving data practices.
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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.
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Proven experience proposing and implementing new processes or tools that improve developer experience and lead to higher quality products.
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Experience collaborating with product teams to lead the development of high-quality, high-impact products, with great communication and collaborative skills.
💛 Our Benefits
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25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)
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Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year
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11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)
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A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off
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Fully remote working — we'll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred
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Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun
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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
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Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here
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Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we're unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time
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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.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Who we are
Sabre Education is an international NGO which, since 2004, has been providing children in Ghana with the best possible early childhood education by partnering with government to implement play-based learning at scale. Sabre focuses on:
Influencing early childhood education (ECE) policy & practice.
Training teachers and school officials in quality early childhood education.
Transforming learning environments to facilitate positive play-based learning.
Sabre has directly trained more than 6,000 teachers and over 700 Ghana Education Service officials, transforming the early years education of more than 361,000 children through high-quality play-based learning. Our teacher training model has been successfully piloted and replicated across 17 districts in Ghana, with partners extending its reach to a further 48 districts.
Building on this success, the Ghana Government is now scaling play-based learning to every public kindergarten in the country, with Sabre as a technical assistance partner, training around 29,000 teachers and reaching an estimated 1.2 million children each year.
Sabre’s new 2026–2029 strategy builds on these achievements by expanding its impact to other countries across sub-Saharan Africa, sharing Ghana’s experience of successfully scaling play-based learning nationwide. Alongside this expansion, Sabre will continue its work in Ghana, implementing a bold early childhood education system-strengthening strategy in close partnership with the government and wider sector stakeholders.
About the role
This is a senior strategic position within the organisation, sitting on the senior leadership team, reporting to the CEO and working closely with colleagues across the UK and Ghana.
As the Director of Fundraising and Communications, you will lead on strengthening and building relationships with Sabre’s growing portfolio of key funders, including trusts, foundations, institutional and corporate donors. Working with leadership and the team, you will also deepen the charity’s profile, reputation and brand.
Key responsibilities include:
- Nurture excellent relationships with Sabre’s current donor community.
- Work with the fundraising team proactively to attract, cultivate, secure and steward grant funders.
- Work with the Senior Fundraising Manager to identify, cultivate and secure new institutional multi-year grants.
- Work closely with the CEO and SLT to develop other income streams when strategically beneficial.
- Provide strategic leadership for all of Sabre’s communications, profile-building and marketing agendas.
- Lead, develop and manage the fundraising and communications team of four.
- Contribute to the organisation’s overall strategic mission as a member of the SLT.
Who we are looking for
This is a leadership role for someone with a proven track record as a senior fundraiser with considerable experience in trusts, foundations and institutional funding and team management. Crucially, you will be passionate about our work in early years education and motivated by the opportunity to shape our fundraising and communications work.
We are also seeking someone with:
- Experience developing and implementing a growth fundraising strategy.
- Strong experience writing technical proposals.
- Outstanding leadership, mentoring and team-building abilities.
- Personal qualities of integrity, credibility and dedication.
Sabre Education is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive community – a place where individual differences and contributions are truly recognised and valued.
We offer a range of inclusive employment policies, flexible working arrangements, staff engagement opportunities and other methods to support staff from different backgrounds.
Sabre is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or disability status.
Actively Interviewing
This organisation is scheduling interviews as applications come in. They're ready to hire as soon as they find the right person. Don't miss your opportunity, apply now!
Head of Data
Remote (UK-based) | Full-time - £104,496 + benefits (including 4.5-day week and 11% employer pension)
Do your best work, for the right reasons.
We're looking for a strategic data leader to define Oak's technical data roadmap and data strategy, and shape how we use, govern and open up our data across our products, our AI and the wider education sector.
You'll lead our data department end-to-end, own data compliance and security, steer our data architecture, and build the open data products and standards that make Oak genuinely useful beyond our own platform.
This is a leadership role with real breadth and impact, grounded in a mission that matters.
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 high-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
💡What you'll be doing:
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Develop and manage a high-performing data department, leveraging internal and/or external relationships.
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Lead the development of our data products (AI assets, open educational resources and datasets), collaborating with external partners including DfE Digital to develop high-impact, transparent datasets and standards.
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Manage the data department budget (minimum 6 figures), covering data tooling, cloud infrastructure, and contractor spend.
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Responsible for all decisions relating to the performance and function of the data department.
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Lead on data compliance, including GDPR and related regulation with copyright and third-party rights the priority alongside data protection, through end-to-end systems we can audit and evidence.
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Maintain specialist expertise in data and analytics and be an authority across Oak and more widely across the sector.
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Own the quality and integrity of the AI and algorithms we build, so they are accurate, fair and safe to put in front of teachers and pupils.
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As a member of the leadership team, contribute to the strategy, planning and model the culture of the organisation.
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Deputise for the Director of Engineering and take on other general responsibilities as required.
🌱 What we're looking for
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5+ years holding responsibility for data and analytics systems across a department, including at least 2 years defining strategy across multiple cross-functional teams.
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Experience of recruiting, developing and managing a high-performing data or analytics team.
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Experience of managing a six-figure budget.
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Experience of building data and AI/ML infrastructure, including training data pipelines, model evaluation, access control and data classification.
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Deep understanding of copyright and content licensing, and of data protection (GDPR and related regulation), with direct experience of owning compliance end to end.
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Experience building public-facing open data products and collaborating with external partners to develop high-impact, transparent datasets and standards.
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Experience of data security practices in a software engineering context, including access control, data classification and incident response.
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Familiarity with modern data stack tooling and the ability to make sound architectural decisions across a data estate.
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A good understanding of education policy and the UK education system (desirable, not essential).
The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute across all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable moving quickly and with agility, and be confident working with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones, as required). You will continually look for ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively.
💛 Our Benefits
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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, which can be varied as you choose). Please note this is a workplace pension rather than the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.
-
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 whole Oak offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun (with other occasional team events in person)
-
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. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.
Interview dates:
-
Interview 1: Wednesday, 2 September and Thursday, 3 September 2026
-
Final interview: Monday, 7 September 2026
If this sounds like somewhere you could do your life's best work, we'd love to hear from you.
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
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.


