Social researcher and advisor jobs in edinburgh

Unifrog’s mission
 

We’re on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to young people finding and applying for their next step after school. We're achieving this by bringing all the available information into one single, impartial, user-friendly platform that helps students to make the best choices, and submit the strongest applications. We also empower teachers and counsellors to manage the progression process effectively.
 

Our outlook is global - we work with schools and universities all over the world, from the US to New Zealand, and from Italy to Hong Kong. We want to make it so that young people can compare every opportunity taught in English, wherever it is in the world, and have all the support they need to make successful applications.
 

We have a clear social purpose, and we’re hugely ambitious. We already work with over half of UK secondary schools, and more than a thousand international schools. We are growing rapidly in terms of the number of our customers, in terms of how much they use our platform, and in terms of the breadth of products we offer.
 

Our team is at the heart of our business and it is integral to our success. We work hard to foster a culture of openness, happiness and innovation, and we commit to helping every individual learn and grow so that they can reach their full potential. We want to hire talented people, whatever their background. If you are excited by our mission and are ready to work hard, please don’t hesitate to apply. We look forward to hearing from you!
 

We believe in the power of diversity. If you are from an ethnic minority background, we would like to strongly encourage you to apply. In advance of applying if you have any questions about working at Unifrog, please contact our Recruitment Lead, Mhairi (contact details on our Jobs page). 

The Unifrog platform

Over the last 12 years, the Unifrog platform has grown enormously from its starting point as a simple tool to help students pick their UK university courses and apprenticeships. It now helps young people from 4 years old up to explore their interests, record the great things they’ve done, compare every post-16 and post-18 course in the UK and every undergraduate programme taught in English in the world, find and organise work experience, and draft their application materials. The platform also helps teachers and career advisers to guide students every step of the way, makes it easy for parents to explore the platform via their own accounts, and helps employer and university recruitment teams to interact directly with students. 

We have a long list of exciting projects for the platform, always aiming to achieve our mission. We are looking for someone to join Unifrog’s team to help us continually improve the platform’s existing tools, and to also develop new ones. 

What you’ll do

You’ll work on improving the platform itself, from how things work behind the scenes, to the user experience and how the tools work and look.

This role does not involve coding - instead you’ll develop and design clear ideas and plans with Unifrog’s two co-founders, and with other colleagues involved in platform development, and then you’ll work with our lead programmer to make them happen.

You will become an expert in:

• The needs of all our different user types, including students, teachers, school groups, universities, employers, and parents

• How to navigate the platform as a user of each type

• How the Unifrog platform works behind the scenes

You’ll be part of the team that:

• Collates feedback on the platform, deciding which changes to move ahead with, and how
   

• Comes up with and designs ideas for platform improvements

• Develops and designs completely new tools

• Investigates potential bugs and comes up with suggested solutions

• Communicates platform changes to the Unifrog team

• Answers queries about the platform from colleagues

 

Working together

You’ll regularly be working with:

• Unifrog’s two co-founders and other colleagues involved in maintaining and developing the platform – in particular our data and content teams – to come up with improvements to the platform and to develop new projects

• Our lead programmer to implement ideas

• User-facing colleagues to understand what our users are asking for, as well as communicate to them what things have changed on the platform

• (More occasionally, but especially at the beginning) our users, when you need to have a greater understanding of a particular topic

You will be line-managed by Unifrog’s two co-founders.

 

Skills and characteristics

We are looking for an independent worker with design skills, who is a great problem solver and is motivated to find an elegant solution, whatever the issue.

Design

You’ll be producing the designs that go to our lead programmer, and which he’ll use as the basis for his work. You should have experience with UX design, and we can accommodate whichever application you prefer to work with, eg Figma or Sketch.

We’ve developed and plan to keep developing a large range of tools on the platform, like:

• Quizzes

• Tools to make large banks of information easy to search and understand

• Tools to simplify complex workflows

• Integrations with other platforms

• Document creation that involves input from multiple people

• Data visualisation

The problems we come up against can involve:

• Different users handling the same processes in different ways from each other

• Different groups of users having competing wants

• A data provider changing the way they structure their data

• Users not completing an important action on the platform

• A change on one tool having a knock-on effect on several other tools

• Users expressing their needs and ideas in uncertain or ambiguous ways
   

Your challenge is to design concrete solutions that work for everyone, which are as simple as possible to implement, and which are immediately understandable by a user who’s never seen them before.

Independence and initiative
 

You will work closely with Unifrog’s two co-founders. While colleagues from the wider team will be involved in coming up with ideas and telling you what they need, you will be the only team member, apart from the co-founders, in the product development team.

Because Unifrog’s co-founders work remotely and are also involved in other areas of the business, this will require you to be a good independent worker:
 

• Able to plan a project and stick to timelines, even when you need to get input from other team members

• Confident to come up with your own ideas, sort out good ideas from less useful ones, and make decisions based on information you’ve researched or been given by other team members

• Open when getting feedback

• Able to adapt to a team used to working in an informal way with few processes, allowing for flexibility and rapid advancements

• Driven to get projects finished and signed off

• Communication

You will need to understand and translate the issues that a user is facing to our lead programmer, and tell him your ideas for solutions and explain your designs in a way that will allow him to get working without needing lots of clarification.

You will need to communicate what development work is happening to the rest of the Unifrog team, and you’ll need to help your colleagues find the best way to tell users about it in turn.

Finally, you will need to be able to adapt your communication style depending on the person you are communicating with, including our lead programmer, other Unifrog team members, or partners and users.

Benefits 

Head to our jobs page for a full list of the excellent benefits we offer our team.

• Join one of Escape the City’s top 1% employers and help transform careers and destinations in schools.

• Become part of a committed, dynamic, and growing company. We want to build our team for the long term: if you do well, we will do our best to make sure you want to stay at the company for a long time.

• Professional development is important at Unifrog. You will define your own 6-month objectives and will be supported by your line manager and the rest of the team to achieve them. You will have an annual training allowance to spend on what you need to grow and progress.

• Influence the company’s direction: we love to promote great ideas, wherever they come from.

Key details

• £45,000 per annum (Grade B)

• Full time.

• Work remotely or in our London or Edinburgh offices.

• 28 days paid holiday per year (plus bank holidays).

• Working hours are 9am to 5pm, Monday to Thursday, and 9am to 4:30pm on Friday.

• Start date: as soon as possible, though we will be flexible for the right candidate.

• If you require reasonable adjustments, or want to discuss any details about the role before applying, please contact our Recruitment Lead, Mhairi (details on our website).

• We can only consider candidates who have the right to work in the UK.

Application process  

Deadline: 10:00am (GMT) on Monday 22nd December 2025.

• We may need to close applications early if we receive a lot of interest. As long as you’ve already started applying, we’ll give you 48 hours’ notice of the deadline changing - so if you’re thinking of applying, please start an application so we can keep you updated. 

Stage 1: Application form (~1 hour) 

• Visit our website to upload your CV and complete the questions and tasks below. 

Please note:

We do not review CVs at this stage of the application process so please be as specific as possible about your experience.

Do not use AI to generate your answers – we compare answers to AI generated answers, and through reviewing lots of applications we quickly spot what's been generated by AI.

• With reference to examples of your recent experience, what would make you an excellent candidate for this role? (250 words)

• Complete the four tasks in this document (max 250 words per task) 

Stage 2: Task

• 2 weeks to do a set of tasks that we’ll give you if you pass the first stage.

• Tasks will be sent out after the application deadline. 

Stage 3: Video call interview (1 hour) 
 

• Q&A from a panel of three, including questions about your experiences and how these relate to the role, and scenario questions based on common situations you might face (plus time for your questions)

• Video interviews will take place w/c 12th January 2026.