Cambridge Spark
Engineering Manager
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Department: Technology
Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office) Reports to: Head of Engineering Hours: 37.5 per week Salary: Depending on experience
Role Overview
This is a significant new role. We are building a product engineering capability that did not previously exist at Cambridge Spark: engineers who own business outcomes rather than feature backlogs, organised into small autonomous pods that own a slice of the learner or applicant experience end to end. We need an Engineering Manager to lead that.
In the first six months of this role, you will help us hire a new pod to own Employer Experience. You will then lead this pod directly, including its people, technical, and delivery outcomes.
The second pod – internal tooling and efficiency – will be hired as the company grows. It will be run day to day by a Tech Lead who owns its technical and delivery outcomes; you will remain line manager for its engineers, own their growth and wellbeing, and will be the escalation route for anything cross-pod.
As the role grows, this split means holding a clean line between what is yours and what belongs to your Tech Lead: staying out of their technical decisions while remaining accountable for the outcome, and coaching them toward their own next level rather than doing their job for them. If you have done this well before, we want to talk to you.
Key Responsibilities
Each responsibility below is the outcome you own. How you deliver it is yours to shape, and will evolve as the team and our tooling mature.
- Pods staffed to plan: you define roles with the Head of Engineering, interview, own onboarding and ramp-up, and improve how we hire as you go.
- Growth and retention: every engineer in your pods has a clear development plan, receives honest and timely feedback, and is visibly getting better at their job. Retention and wellbeing risks surface early rather than as resignations. Your Tech Lead is growing as a leadership-track peer.
- A coherent two-pod operating model: the division of ownership between you and your Tech Lead is clean and mutually understood, with no gaps and no double-ownership.
- Reliable delivery across both pods: work flows without avoidable ambiguity or rework, and stakeholders can trust the commitments made against it. Directly for the pod you lead; through your Tech Lead for the second.
- Work that is ready before it starts: you partner closely with our Product Manager to ensure what enters both pods is properly framed, and you push back when it is not.
- Sound technical foundations in your pods: architecture, code quality, and maintainability remain sound. Technical decisions get made deliberately rather than by default.
- Credible technical presence without becoming a dependency: you understand the EDUKATE.ai platform well enough to lead design discussions and review code effectively, and you contribute to code off the critical path, but never enough that delivery waits on you.
- Incidents handled as a discipline, not a scramble: you help us build and own incident management across both pods: the response runs, the business hears from us clearly, and we learn something afterwards. Technical response within a pod sits with its Tech Lead.
- Agreed practices that stick rather than decay: SDLC, including our AI-assisted development norms, where your own habits will set the ceiling for the team's.
Candidate Specification
Technical
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- Proven experience managing software engineers: 1:1s, growth planning, and performance management, including the difficult conversations.
- Sufficiently hands-on in a modern web stack to lead design discussions, review code effectively, and contribute meaningfully. Professional experience with Python, React, or Vue is a bonus, not a requirement.
- Track record of leading delivery in an agile environment: running ceremonies, managing flow, and shipping reliably against commitments.
- Active engagement with AI-assisted development tools and leading adoption of them. We expect you to use these tools and bring that practice to the engineers in your pods.
- Experience hiring and onboarding engineers.
Stakeholder and Communication
- Strong written communication: you can write a proposal, a decision record, or a stakeholder update for a business, tech, or leadership audience.
- Comfortable representing engineering realities honestly to Product and senior leadership, including when delivering bad news.
- Able to work directly with non-technical colleagues across curriculum, operations, and delivery to understand problems at their root.
Ways of Working
- Clean ownership. You can hold a boundary with a technical counterpart without either policing it or letting it blur.
- Comfortable with ambiguity. Our pod model is real but still maturing. You make good decisions with incomplete information and know when to escalate versus when to proceed.
- Outcome ownership over activity. You question whether the work is the right work, not just whether the team can deliver it.
- Collaboration without ego. You care about the outcome more than the credit, and you build trust through competence and consistency.
- Communicative by default. You surface problems early and keep people appropriately informed without being prompted.
Desirable
- Experience operating in a pod- or squad-based organisational model.
- Experience building in a bootstrapped or resource-constrained business.
- Genuine interest in education, apprenticeships, and online learning.
What This Role Is Not
- It is not a role where you inherit an existing pod. We are hiring the engineers in parallel with this role.
- It is not a hands-off management role: you lead a pod directly, review code, and are expected to stay technically current.
- It is not a hands-on engineering role either: your contribution to the codebase is sized to your management load and deliberately kept off the critical path.
- It is not a delivery management or project management role: you own people and technical outcomes, not a Gantt chart.
- It is not a role with mature process to inherit: incident management, engineering metrics, and our agile practices are all in active development. You will be building them, not operating them.
- It is not a big-company environment: we are a bootstrapped edtech business, and you will need to be comfortable with resource constraints and some ambiguity about what comes next.
Why This Role
- Real scope from day one: a newly established pod to lead, a future pod to hire, a Tech Lead to develop, and genuine influence over how engineering management works here as we grow.
- Direct access to and influence with senior leadership, including the Head of Engineering and CEO.
- Work that matters: our platform supports thousands of learners across data and AI apprenticeships, and the quality of what your pods build has a traceable impact on their experience and careers.
- An AI-serious engineering culture: we are an AI company and expect our engineering practice to reflect that, including giving you time and space to experiment.
- A stable, values-driven business with a social impact mission in education and skills.
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Company Benefits
- Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
- 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
- A day for volunteering
- Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
- Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
- Annual Summer and Xmas events
- Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
- CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
- Private medical insurance and cash plan
- Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
- Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor
Background to our Organisation
We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.
We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.
Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m.
Our Values
At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:
Entrepreneurial
We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.
Team Spirit
Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.
Customer-focused
Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.
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