Lingumi (https://lingumi.com) is a fast-growing EdTech startup with a mission to make English learning fun, affordable, and effective for the next billion young learners. We’re creating an education ecosystem that impacts the next billion children, and some of the UK’s best VCs and angels have backed us to do just that.

We’re hiring a Software Engineer with a primary focus on backend development to drive forward the development of Lingumi’s pre-school English learning platform.

Our current flagship subscription product is a mobile app that helps children aged 2-6 years old around the world learn English. Our digital curriculum covers everything from simple nouns to building sentences in a way that makes our young learners happy, proud and fulfilled. We’re currently building out our digital curriculum to help our children achieve a pre-A1 level of productive and receptive English. No product in the market has ever achieved this.

Our values make Lingumi what it is today. We aim to make our learners happy, proud and fulfilled whilst also taking efficacy seriously - we’re here to teach English. We expect every team member to have a growth mindset, determination and a positive attitude. In return, we will try to provide you with the means and resources to help you achieve everything you want while at Lingumi. We believe people should be free to know their own working rhythm and in order to be at their most productive - we dont expect you to conform to the norm. This is why we make sure we have a working environment that supports everyone and have a diverse international team to support that.

What you will be working on

At Lingumi, we have big ambitions for the future and we are looking for someone to help make those happen. As a small team, every member is given a large amount of responsibility and autonomy, and plenty of opportunities to learn new skills and develop existing ones. Some of the responsibilities for this role include:

• Developing our personalised learning engine to deliver a curriculum that fits every child
• Designing, engineering and maintaining our AWS-hosted backend infrastructure across multiple regions to bring affordable English education to families around the world
• Implementing systems to measure (and features to demonstrate to parents) how we teach and track progress against language goals in the digital curriculum
• Writing high-quality application code in node.js to provide new features/support for our mobile application and internal tools
• Working in a team of skilled engineers to maintain a high-quality code base
• Working cross-discipline alongside designers, marketers, linguists and other non-engineering roles
• Iterating and leading process and developer operation changes and workflows
• Contributing to reviews, retrospectives and planning discussions for technical, product and company decisions
• Using data, feedback and analysis to lead and manage customer-facing product decisions

What we’re looking for

You will be someone who has / will have:

• Experience with AWS, preferably in a production environment
• Passion for startups and entrepreneurship
• Strong growth mindset - we’re looking for someone who wants to grow
• Interest in making the team better as much as the product, including familiarity with agile processes
• Strong software engineering skills, including experience with version control, code reviews and iteration-based workflows (e.g. scrum)
• Care for designing software and backend architectures
• Empathy for the customer and is comfortable to make product-driven decisions on behalf of them
• Strong communication skills. This includes speaking fluent English - we use English as the shared language to communicate and discuss ideas but it doesn’t need to be your first language.
• Ability to work autonomously - including planning, handling your own deadlines and making big, bold decisions - we trust each other and we’ll trust you too
• This role requires being principally based near one of our offices in London or Cardiff

You might have experience or interest in:

• This role requires being principally based in one of our offices in London or Cardiff
• Speaking or learning any other languages: we speak several in the team, and our customers speak many more.* (Pre-school) education and language-learning* Full-stack engineering, preferably for mobile applications used by real customers
• Linguistics and academic research
• Releasing apps for iOS and Android
• Experience with node.js and Javascript
• Experience in C# or similar language

• Access to online and offline opportunities to help excel your personal development, including a monthly productivity budget
• An annual team retreat and local team-bonding event
• Ownership and autonomy over your work. We share and support each other, so that no one is left struggling with a task on their own. We don’t believe that titles make you entitled, and all members of the team have an equal voice
• Being part of the customer journey - we regularly get sent videos and comments from our customers saying how much they love and value the work we do to make it possible for their child to begin playfully learning English
• Doing something that improves lives, and makes a positive impact. This sounds fluffy, but it’s an amazing motivator for us
• Equity in the company - we all own a slice of the pie