Freelance Maths/STEM Educator (Online)
Location: Remote (UK-Based)
Rate: £30 per hour (includes delivery, lesson preparation, and reporting time)
Hours: Lessons may take place between 13:00 to 18:00, Monday to Thursday. You will not be required during all these times. You will invoice us on a per lesson basis.
Start Date: 1st September 2026
Contract Type: Freelance
About the Role:
Are you an enthusiastic, qualified teacher with a passion for bringing STEM to life? Gaia Learning is looking for a dedicated online STEM Educator to join our amazing team for the new academic year. In this freelance role, you will deliver engaging, high-quality lessons to our neurodivergent learners and those with special educational needs, helping them thrive in a flexible, calm, and supportive online environment.
Key Requirements & Responsibilities:
Why Gaia Learning?
We are a warm, inclusive, and fast-growing team dedicated to removing barriers to learning for SEN students. If you want to make a real difference in SEN education, we would love to hear from you!
To Apply: Please send your CV and a brief introduction to our team: info@gaialearning.co.uk
Location: UK-based, remote-first. Brighton or commutable preferred
Salary: £60,000 per annum
Type: Permanent, full-time
Holiday: 31 days including bank holidays
Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Start Date: To be confirmed
Gaia Learning is looking for a talented and experienced Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to join our growing technology team and take primary day-to-day ownership of Bloom, our live online education platform supporting young people with SEND and EHCPs.
Bloom is a production platform used by teachers, learners and school administrators, with guardian access coming soon. Lessons are delivered live in the browser and include video, a shared whiteboard, resources, attendance and end-of-lesson reviews. The platform is supported by learner profiles, objectives, safeguarding records and AI-assisted summarisation of documents and lesson outcomes.
We are now past MVP and firmly into production. We work closely with schools and local authorities, continuously improving the platform through focused sprints. The platform is small, modern and unusually well documented for its age, and we are looking for a senior engineer to work alongside the CTO and take real ownership of the technology.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role rather than a management position. You will be responsible for writing most of the code across the frontend, API and cloud infrastructure, while setting and maintaining the quality standards for a platform that handles children's special category data.
If you want to be the person who understands a system end to end and is trusted to make architectural decisions, this could be the role for you. If you are looking for a narrow ticket queue within a large engineering team, it isn't.
You will work across the full technology stack, building features across our React and TypeScript single-page application and PHP API.
Most features involve both sides of the platform, so you will be expected to design APIs and build the interfaces that consume them.
You will take ownership of our cloud environments and infrastructure-as-code, including the security and data-residency controls required for a platform handling children's data.
You will own our development and deployment pipeline, including test-gated builds, deployments and the alerting around them.
You will help set and maintain the quality bar across the codebase, including:
You will be expected to raise standards where needed and ensure the rest of the work is held to them.
Our current technology stack includes:
Our Google Cloud environments are hosted in a UK region, with infrastructure managed as code.
You will not be expected to be an expert in every part of the stack from day one. What matters is that you have strong full-stack foundations, can learn quickly and are comfortable becoming highly knowledgeable in areas where you have less experience.
We will go through the architecture in detail during the technical stage of the interview process.
We build with Claude Code, and being genuinely comfortable with agentic coding is an important part of this role.
Our repository is set up specifically to support agentic development, with guardrails, written architecture rules and an explicit Definition of Done. A meaningful share of our development output comes through agentic workflows.
This is not a side experiment or something we are simply testing. It is part of how a small team is able to ship at the pace we do.
We are looking for someone who has their own approach to using these tools, has genuine opinions about where they are useful and where they are not, and understands the importance of carefully reviewing AI-generated code.
You should be able to use AI coding tools productively while applying the same — or higher — level of engineering judgement and scrutiny that you would apply when reviewing code written by another engineer.
Full-Stack Engineering Experience:
Substantial experience building and running production web applications, with genuine depth across both frontend and backend development. We are looking for someone who can work confidently across the entire stack rather than a frontend engineer who has occasionally worked with an API or a backend engineer who can build a React component.
React & TypeScript:
Strong experience with React and TypeScript, including component architecture, state management, forms and performance. You should understand how to maintain a feature-based codebase and prevent it from becoming difficult to maintain as it grows.
PHP:
Strong server-side development experience with PHP.
Database & Data Modelling:
Strong understanding of relational data modelling. You should be comfortable designing schemas, writing safe migrations against live data and reasoning about database queries and performance under load.
Cloud & Infrastructure:
Experience owning cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code. You should be comfortable being called when production is unhappy and understand when the correct solution belongs in infrastructure-as-code rather than being manually changed through a cloud console.
Security:
Security should be part of your everyday engineering practice. You should understand authenticated and authorised endpoints, server-side input validation, secure handling of secrets and least-privilege principles.
Agentic Coding:
Fluent and considered use of agentic coding tools, particularly Claude Code, or clearly transferable experience with similar tools.
Communication:
Strong written and verbal communication skills. You will work closely with a small non-engineering team, external suppliers and schools, so being able to explain technical decisions clearly is important.
Experience with any of the following would be beneficial:
You do not need:
What matters is that you can demonstrate that you can build and run the product well.
We are a small team with low ceremony and high standards.
We work in sprints using a ClickUp backlog, with pull requests reviewed before merging.
We have a written Definition of Done, which includes:
Our architecture rules are documented and actively enforced.
If you disagree with an architectural decision, you are encouraged to challenge it in writing, explain your reasoning and help improve the approach.
Documentation is considered part of the development work itself rather than something to be added later.
This is a remote-first, UK-based role.
We would ideally like you to be within reach of Brighton, where you would co-work with the CTO approximately one or two days per week.
We recognise that not everyone will be based locally, so if you are commutable to Brighton, we are happy to have a conversation about what could work.
We believe that, particularly at this stage of the platform's development, architecture benefits from being able to sit down together, work through problems and make decisions around a whiteboard and a coffee.
Bloom is built for schools and local authorities, so compliance and security are fundamental to how we develop the platform.
We handle special category data relating to children with SEND, including EHCPs, health information and safeguarding records.
As a result:
Our security work is shaped by ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials.
Accessibility is equally important. Our learners are the reason accessibility matters, and we aim to hold the platform to WCAG 2.2 AA standards.
An accessibility review is part of our Definition of Done, and maintaining accessibility across the platform will be an important part of this role.
None of this is simply box-ticking. It is fundamental to why schools and local authorities trust us with their learners.
Bloom holds special category data about children with SEND, including EHCPs, health information and safeguarding records.
Our platform and data are UK-hosted and pinned there by policy, with production access tightly controlled.
Because this role involves production access to this data, the position is restricted to candidates who are UK-based and have the right to work in the UK.
To help us maintain a safe and secure environment for our learners, the successful candidate will be required to complete a number of checks.
Shortlisted candidates will be asked to:
These checks will take place prior to interview.
Any formal offer of employment will be subject to satisfactory completion of post-offer pre-employment checks, including:
If any of these fundamental eligibility or safeguarding checks would be a blocker for you, we would rather know at the application stage than at offer stage.
The nature of the role means that engineering decisions can have a direct impact on the security, safety and reliability of a platform used by children. We are looking for someone who finds that level of responsibility motivating rather than intimidating.
Gaia Learning is a warm, inclusive and growing organisation working to improve education for young people with SEND.
You will have the opportunity to work on a product with a genuine social purpose while having significant influence over how the technology develops.
This is an opportunity to join at an exciting stage: Bloom is already a production platform, but there is still significant scope to shape its architecture, engineering standards and future development.
You will work directly alongside the CTO and have meaningful ownership of the technology rather than being one engineer in a large development function.
If you enjoy solving difficult problems, taking ownership and building technology that genuinely matters, we would love to hear from you.
Our recruitment process will include:
Intro Call – 30 minutes
An initial conversation with the CTO to learn more about you, your experience and the role.
Interview 1: Technical Conversation – 60–90 minutes
A detailed conversation about the real architecture behind Bloom, the technical decisions we have made and what you might have approached differently.
You will also have the opportunity to walk us through some code of your own choosing or a system you have built if your professional work is proprietary.
Interview 2: Non-Technical / Cultural Conversation – 30–60 minutes
Meet with the CTO and another member of the team to discuss life at Gaia Learning, Bloom and the wider team.
Final Conversation
A final discussion covering terms and the offer.
We will come back to everyone who applies.
Please send your CV to Zaq Mughal, CTO, at zaq@gaialearning.co.uk.
Alongside your CV, please tell us one thing about how you actually use agentic coding tools day to day.
We are not looking for theory. Tell us about your workflow, how you use these tools in practice and where you have found their limits.
July 2026
Job Title: Part-Time Secondary level Humanities Educator (Online)
Location: Remote (UK-Based)
Salary: £35,000 per annum, pro-rata
Hours: 12:00 – 17:00, Monday to Thursday (20 hours per week)
Start Date: 1st September 2026
About the Role:
Are you an enthusiastic, qualified teacher with a passion for bringing the humanities to life? Gaia Learning is looking for a dedicated Humanities Educator to join our amazing online team for the new academic year. You will be delivering engaging, high-quality lessons to our neurodivergent learners, helping them thrive in a flexible and supportive online environment. We are looking for someone to teach small group History, English and 1:1 sessions.
What We Are Looking For:
Why Gaia Learning?
We are a warm, inclusive, and fast-growing team of all ages, backgrounds, and ambitions. If you want to make a real difference in SEN education we would love to hear from you.
We would consider a freelance part time position if necessary.
To Apply: Please send your CV and a brief introduction to info@gaialearning.co.uk
We are looking to hold interviews w/c 13th, 20th and 27th July.
Call us: 0151 808 0232
Gaia Learning, First Floor, Swan Buildings, 20 Swan Street, Manchester, M4 5JW
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