Senior systems engineer jobs in edinburgh

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 AI Engineer to join our AI Platform team.

The AI Platform team supports our product teams in developing the best and safest AI features in the EdTech space. The team maintain AI platform services, prompt libraries, and reusable pipelines that can be applied across multiple projects.

In this role, you may work on:

• Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines,

• 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.

This is a hands-on role with plenty of scope for technical leadership and mentoring, alongside the opportunity to shape our engineering practices and culture. You'll be part of a supportive, collaborative team that cares deeply about accessibility, usability, and delivering tools that genuinely improve learning.

�� What You’ll Be Doing

• Develop and maintain web and data systems that meet our high standards of safety, security, reliability and accessibility

• Lead the team on specific areas of the system, infrastructure, or code base.

• Deliver high-quality software and services, using appropriate tools, testing, deployment and monitoring to ensure reliability and maintainability.

• Share knowledge and provide guidance to less experienced colleagues.

• 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 senior software engineers and take on other general responsibilities as required

�� What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years experience of continuously improving services using AI/ Web apps technologies

• Knowledge of relevant common architectures, with some experience designing simple technical solutions based on product requirements

• Professional experience building high-performing software using modern frameworks and libraries relevant to the product area  (e.g. NumPy, pandas, and scikit-learn.

• Experience designing, testing, and deploying reliable software systems, including automated testing and, where relevant, evaluation of model or system performance using cloud-based tools.

• Able to collaborate effectively in multidisciplinary teams and communicate clearly.

�� 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.

We use the Applied recruitment platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. 

�� 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 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).

If you are shortlisted, we’ll invite you to the next stage, which will consist of a remote technical interview and a technical pairing session conducted over Zoom. This will last approximately two hours.

We love giving feedback, so at the end of the application process, we'll share how well you performed.

We aim to begin interviews in December 2025.

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, please submit your application promptly to avoid missing out.

We are an equal opportunities 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.