We're looking for a lead software engineer to own the development of Skiller Whale's web application, through which we manage and deliver live workshops to help software engineers grow. You'll be working closely with the CTO (that's me) to architect the system, maintain and build our platform, solve problems and help us to provide excellent learning to as many people as we can.

We're not looking for someone to just pick tickets off a feature board and implement them. We want somebody who seeks to understand enough context to highlight risks, suggest alternative solutions, come up with exciting ideas and then make them reality. You'll have a high degree of trust and autonomy, and need to be comfortable having responsibility for the application.

About Skiller Whale

At Skiller Whale, we change what tech teams are capable of through live, expert-led workshops that developers love (they give us an average satisfaction rating of 4.8/5). Our sessions are short, targeted, and hands-on – challenging engineers to solve real problems with an expert there to help and explain as they go.

Learners Regularly Tell Us

_“The real-time feedback loop of learning something, putting it into practice, and getting insight beyond ‘it works’ beats any other learning experience I’ve had by miles.”

__“I loved that I could ask any questions at all, and learned new things even in a technology I’ve been using for 15 years!”

_We believe that learning should be a productivity multiplier, not just a perk. And we're proving it - our coaching measurably impacts on the productivity of teams we work with.

We've grown revenue by 50%+ each year since Skiller Whale was founded in 2018, and have been profitable since the end of 2024. Our goal is to now accelerate this growth by continually improving coverage in what we coach, acquiring larger enterprise customers and continually increasing our brand awareness amongst the engineering leadership community.

The Team

We have a tight-knit core team of 10 people (6 of whom are software engineers), and a much larger community of senior and lead engineers who coach our sessions for a few hours each week.

We work fully remotely, but regularly catch up socially with each other, play online boardgames at lunchtime and have regular company updates / 'fin-wags' online (in case you couldn't tell from the company name, we love a pun). Twice a year we get together in person for a couple of days to have fun, and share information / talk company strategy.

From our most recent employee NPS survey we got a 93% rating.

Our Values

The culture we’ve built at Skiller Whale is one of the things we’re most proud of – and it’s been a key part of how we hire and grow from day one. We also managed to turn our key values into a thematic acronym (though, in the spirit of openness, we’ll admit we slightly tweaked one word to make it fit).

We prioritise Openness, Rationality, Creativity and Autonomy - check out what we mean by these terms on our Notion page about values.

We believe that diversity makes us stronger and are dedicated to building a company that represents society as a whole. We value honest and open communication, and we believe that in order to foster an environment that enables this, it’s important that our team feel included and recognised.

We embrace flexible working, and 70% of our team, including all three founders are parents of young children, which makes this a necessity at times. Some of our team work 4 days a week, and we'd be open to this role being flexible - please ask if you have specific requirements.

The Role

We think an ideal fit for this role would be an experienced senior or lead software engineer who likes moving at speed, seeing the impact of their work, and thrives in an environment of high ownership and autonomy. Your time will be mostly dedicated to planning and building software, rather than people or project management, although you will be interacting regularly with people in other parts of the business to understand their problems and help come up with solutions.

You'll be the only person working full time on the application codebase, but strong engineering practices are core to our company culture, and you would not be working in isolation. You can expect daily standups, regular planning meetings and our production code all goes through PR review with the CTO or one of the Curriculum Team (who are all senior software / data engineers).

What You Can Expect To Work On

Designing and building system architecture in the cloud (previous projects have included custom online environments for learners to write and run code, a websocket -> sse proxy to get around firewalls that block websocket traffic, and a system to manage allocation of AWS accounts to learners so they are available for their sessions).
Planning and developing new app features, (e.g. allowing break-out video conferencing groups within our coaching sessions, live-shared drawing whiteboards, smart-scheduling). You'll be given a lot of trust to make decisions, but with the support of the CTO
Improving our build, testing and deployment processes.
Fixing bugs, improving app performance etc.
Collaborating with our CTO on the engineering side of our product roadmap, helping to define requirements and come up with creative solutions to business problems.
Whilst the company is small, we’d also love you to be involved in the development of our teaching material if this interests you. This could be coming up with interesting and realistic code exercises / demo apps, writing clear explanations, or even leading some workshops depending on your skills and preferences.

Requirements

Essential

We think it's unlikely that the right candidate for this role won't meet these requirements:

5+ years of experience building, maintaining and securing web applications, with at least some work on infrastructure, databases, backend and frontend.
3+ years (and a high level of comfort) working with Ruby on Rails in a commercial team.
Experience building and maintaining cloud infrastructure (ideally using AWS and Terraform).
Strong written and verbal communication skills (fluent English).
Comfort in a fast moving environment, where priorities can sometimes change quickly - ideally in a startup or scale-up.

For the most part, we expect you'll be able to fill knowledge gaps with specific tools, as long as you've had relevant experience. So don't worry if you've used GCP more than AWS, or CloudFormation instead of Terraform - we'd expect your understanding of the concepts to enable you to learn quickly.

However, we feel that Rails is quite specific, and therefore a hard requirement since most of our backend code is written in Rails and we need you to be able to hit the ground running.

Nice to have

Experience owning the performance, monitoring and security side of web services.
Interest in helping others to learn, such as mentoring developers at work.
Familiarity with React and TypeScript.
Comfort working with Terraform, Docker and AWS.
Experience using multiple additional programming languages.
Deep expertise in any other popular technologies.

Benefits

£80,000-110,000 FTE salary, depending on background.
Equity options in a growing, and profitable company.
Enhanced parental leave.
MacBook Pro provided.
Up to £1000 to help set-up and improve your home office.
Fully remote work, forever.
Kind and collaborative company culture.
25 days holiday + public holidays, with flexible work options.
Be a key part of growing our company, providing a valuable service you wish you'd had access to in your career.
Make a huge impact in helping to build and shape the product, team and culture as we grow.
Learn something new every week: working across the whole stack, and helping review our evolving teaching content, you’ll be exposed to new technologies all the time.