Senior Software Engineer

Salary: £47,719 - £59,648, negotiable depending on experience

Job Type: Full-Time, Permanent

Location: Cardiff, UK

Hybrid working: 2 days in office

About the IB

The International Baccalaureate provides world-class educational services to over 6,000 schools across 160 countries. A career with the IB is not just a job; it's an opportunity to work with an innovative world leader in education services where we empower our employees to thrive and make a difference.

About the job

This Senior Software Engineer role sits within the Educator Experience domain. Its purpose is to ensure that IB educators are equipped to teach IB programmes efficiently, feel supported throughout their journey, and can continually upskill through high-quality professional learning products and resources. As one of the IB's vertical user-facing domains, Educator Experience plays a critical role in shaping how educators access, experience and benefit from the IB's digital ecosystem.
The role reports to the Engineering Manager in the Educator Experience domain and is embedded in a cross-functional product squad with product management, UX and data teams to support shared accountability for successful delivery. This highly technical role drives innovative software solutions, provides guidance to other engineers and supports consistent, high-quality engineering practices and reliable delivery rhythms aligned with the IB's long-term vision for digital excellence.

You will provide senior technical leadership across educator-facing systems, helping deliver stable, scalable platforms that continually improve the educator experience. Working with internal teams, vendors and delivery partners, you will support safe change, platform modernisation and sustainable delivery while strengthening in-house engineering capability.

• Provide senior technical leadership across educator-facing systems, improving platform performance, resilience and the educator experience.

• Guide product and test engineers in cross-functional squads, supporting consistent engineering standards and high-quality delivery.

• Act as a technical subject matter expert for educator content and professional learning applications, informing trade-offs and protecting system integrity.

• Apply and reinforce strong engineering practices across architecture, code quality, testing, security and operational performance.

• Constructively challenge technical approaches to modernise systems, reduce technical debt and improve delivery outcomes.

• Review vendor and delivery partner outputs, ensuring alignment with IB engineering standards and integration requirements.

• Contribute to technical roadmaps, identifying sequencing, dependencies, constraints and cross-domain implications.

• Support platform consolidation and architectural simplification while escalating significant technical risks and trade-offs.

• Maintain operational stability while enabling iterative product development and longer-term technical evolution.

• Build strong relationships with product, UX, data and business stakeholders to align engineering delivery with educator and school needs.

• Extensive experience as a senior software engineer or technical lead delivering and operating large-scale digital platforms in complex organisations.

• Strong practical knowledge of cloud platforms, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, observability, secure development, automated testing and reliability engineering.

• Strong full-stack experience with technologies such as Angular, JavaScript, TypeScript, React and Node.js.

• Experience integrating headless CMS platforms, including platforms such as Sanity CMS, with frontend frameworks and third-party APIs.

• Extensive experience delivering Scrum-based Agile projects and collaborating with cross-functional product teams.

• Proven experience improving platform performance, stability and reliability through effective engineering practices and metrics.

• Experience mentoring engineers, sharing knowledge and supporting continuous learning and constructive technical challenge.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to explain technical options, trade-offs and risks clearly.

• Experience contributing to system modernisation, legacy uplift, architectural simplification or technical debt reduction.

• Working understanding of security, data protection and compliance requirements, including GDPR, for digital platforms.

Benefits

• Flexible benefits allowance equivalent to 1.5% of Annual Salary to spend on benefits or as addition to salary

• 10% employer pension contribution with a 3% employee contribution

• Enhanced family friendly benefits

• 25 Days Annual Leave plus public holidays. The opportunity to purchase up to 5 days of leave each year

• Life assurance 4x annual salary

• Flexible working hours (core hours are 10am-12pm and 2pm-3pm), 37.5 hours per week

• Paid volunteering leave

• Excellent continuous professional development

Opportunity & Belonging

We are committed to building a working environment that values respect, diversity, and compassion. The International Baccalaureate is proud to be an equal opportunities employer, and we welcome applications from all qualified applicants. As a global employer, we adhere to all relevant employment legislation in the countries in which we operate, and we're happy to provide any reasonable support or adjustments as needed to ensure applicants can fully participate in our recruitment process.