This is an exciting opportunity to take the technical lead on a growing open-source initiative, helping to develop the shared data and AI infrastructure that enables schools to make better use of data. As Lead Engineer, you will play a central role in maintaining and strengthening the Open Education AI (OEAI) framework, ensuring its schema, repositories and governance are robust, fit for purpose and ready to scale.

We are looking for a Technical Lead to join OEAI at a pivotal stage in its development. OEAI maintains an open-source data and AI framework for schools and trusts through GitHub, bringing together a shared schema, open modules and packages, and common standards that enable different providers to build on the same foundations.

The framework's technical direction is established through agreed standards and ratified by the OEAI Technical Authority (TA), a volunteer body of sector and technical experts. The TA meets monthly to agree standards, review proposals and ratify changes, which the Lead Engineer is responsible for implementing. We also work closely with Edequity AI Limited to build and deploy tools and services that enable trusts to benefit from the framework. Alongside this, partners and community contributors submit work to the open repositories, supporting a collaborative approach to developing best-in-class solutions for the sector.

In this role, you will take day-to-day ownership of the open-source commons, translating the TA's decisions into practice, securing and managing our test environment, triaging issues flagged from our live environment, and acting as a central point of contact for contributors and community members. You will combine hands-on technical expertise with the opportunity to help shape and strengthen an open-source ecosystem with the potential to benefit schools across the sector. 

Please download the add link to the full job description on the PV website.

Job Description

Purpose

The Technical Lead forms part of the core OEAI team and acts as the working arm of the Technical Authority (TA), providing technical leadership and day-to-day stewardship of OEAI's shared data and AI framework. Working closely with the TA, the role provides expert technical advice, recommends architectural improvements and translates agreed technical direction into practice.

The role is responsible for maintaining the OEAI schema as the canonical standard, overseeing public and private repositories, reviewing contributions against agreed standards and managing technical issues. It also supports the effective operation of the TA, ensuring technical proposals, decisions and priorities are documented and implemented.

Through building strong relationships with sector partners and contributors, the Technical Lead helps shape the framework's ongoing development, maintaining a consistent and impartial approach that prioritises the needs of schools and trusts over commercial interests. The role ensures OEAI's technical infrastructure remains robust, secure and scalable as the organisation grows.

Responsibilities and duties

Schema ownership

• Maintain the OEAI schema as the single canonical source, with semantic versioning, a changelog and deprecation policy.

• Run schema change control: log proposals, assess impact on existing modules and deployments, and prepare recommendations for TA ratification.

• Publish schema documentation, data dictionaries and mappings to sector standards (for example DfE data definitions and MIS data models).

• Maintain validation tooling and test environments so partners and contributors can check conformance themselves.

Repository stewardship

• Administer the OEAI GitHub organisation: repository structure, access, branch protection, CI checks and release tagging.

• Decide, with the TA, what is public and what stays private, and manage the promotion of private work to public release.

• Enforce Apache 2.0 licensing, contributor agreements and third-party licence compliance.

• Monitor dependency and security alerts, and coordinate fixes with whoever owns the affected code.

Contribution review and partner pull requests

• Review pull requests from all partners and contributors against published standards.

• Merge, request changes or decline, with the reasoning logged.

• Escalate contested or significant contributions to the TA rather than decide them alone.

• Track and report service levels for review turnaround.

Community triage

• Own the public issue tracker: triage bugs, label, prioritise and respond.

• Fix small defects in shared and reference code; route anything larger into the module build process.

• Collect requests for new modules and features, frame them as intake for the build process and as inputs to the TA.

• Be the visible technical voice of OEAI in community channels.

Technical Authority operations

• Maintain the TA decision log and the published technical roadmap for the schema, standards and repository.

• Carry TA decisions into the repositories, schema and standards, and report back on progress, assurance and reporting.

• Keep documentation needed for due diligence, audit and contracts.

• Contribute to information governance and data-protection reviews of the schema (for example DPIA inputs on new data fields).

• Report regularly to the TA Chair and PV on the health of the commons: open issues, review times, releases, adoption.

Security

• Treat the open repositories as a software supply chain that schools and trusts depend on and secure them accordingly.

• Enforce maintainer account security (2FA, least-privilege access, regular access reviews) and protected release processes.

• Guard against malicious or careless contributions: CI that never exposes secrets to fork pull requests, secret scanning, dependency pinning and provenance checks.

• Publish and run a vulnerability disclosure policy, coordinate advisories and fixes across all affected contributors.

• Ensure nothing in the public commons exposes pupil, staff or trust data, credentials or customer configuration.

Partnerships and relationships

• Own technical relationships with partners to anticipate and get advance notice of upstream changes.

• Verify and approve partner and community contributors in line with standards set.

The job description is subject to change and the postholder may be required to undertake tasks not specifically referred to above. Such duties, however, will fall within the scope of the job description.

Who we are looking for

Key requirements

Essential

• Passionate about creating a fairer society where all young people thrive.

• Demonstrable track record of taking ownership of commitments and working hard to succeed.

• Significant, hands-on experience in software or data engineering, including experience as a maintainer, reviewer or tech lead.

• Deep experience of data modelling and schema design, including versioning and backward compatibility.

• Python and SQL; familiarity with modern data platforms and lakehouse tooling.

• Fluent with Git and GitHub administration: branch protection, Actions/CI, releases, permissions, security alerts.

• Strong understanding of security in open, community-maintained codebases: supply-chain risk, contributor trust, secrets management and coordinated disclosure.

• Experience reviewing other people's code at volume and giving clear, fair, documented decisions.

• Working knowledge of open-source licensing (Apache 2.0) and contribution governance.

• Strong technical writing: specifications, decision papers, contributor guides.

• Proven ability to work with volunteers, partners and committees without direct authority.

• Sound understanding of UK GDPR and data protection as they apply to children's data.

• Proven ability to identify, assess and manage technical risk across a product or service. This covers security, data protection, reliability, technical debt and reliance on third-party suppliers.

• Able to explain risks and trade-offs clearly to people without a technical background so that they can make informed decisions.

• Ability to work effectively with external partners and suppliers, bringing technical expertise and representing the organisation’s interests.

• Excellent written and spoken communication. Able to adapt tone, level of detail and use of technical language to the audience, whether that is engineers, senior leaders, partners or non-technical colleagues.

• Able to prioritise competing demands, track progress and adjust plans as needs change. Familiar with agile or similar delivery methods.

• A strong commitment to quality, with experience of setting up and maintaining quality practices such as code review, automated testing, documentation and controlled release processes.

• Makes sure work meets agreed standards before it is delivered.

• We are unable to offer Skilled Worker Sponsorship for this role. Applicants will therefore need to have the right to work in the UK

Desirable

• Hands-on experience of UK school MIS data schemas (for example SIMS, Arbor, Bromcom, iSAMS) and common data aggregators (for example Wonde, Groupcall Xporter).

• Experience with wider UK education data: DfE returns (census, attendance), assessment or safeguarding data.

• Maintainer or core contributor on an open-source project or open standard.

• Experience with standards bodies, technical steering committees or RFC-style processes.

• Exposure to AI/ML governance, explainability, algorithmic impact assessment or privacy-enhancing technologies.

• Working knowledge of the charity or not-for-profit sector, ideally within education, AI or EdTech