Senior Migrations Engineer

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. 
We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. 
Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. 
At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. 

We are looking for a highly technical and customer focused Senior Migrations Engineer to join our Engineering team and help us build and evolve the Migrations Platform that underpins how Arbor onboards new schools. The remit and focus of the role is to deliver high-quality engineering work that ensures migrations are reliable, observable, and meet defined SLAs. It’s a broad and exciting role, so we’re looking for someone up for a challenge - if you’re an experienced and collaborative candidate, this is the role for you.

Core responsibilities

• Migrations Platform Development: Design, build, and evolve the Migrations Platform — a mission-critical PHP application — ensuring it is reliable, performant, and scalable as we onboard increasing volumes of schools.
• SLA Ownership: Take ownership of the platform's defined SLAs, including migration success rates, throughput, and turnaround times. Identify and deliver improvements that raise the bar on reliability and quality.
• Reliability and Performance: Take services from design through to production with end-to-end ownership. Ensure they are observable, with the logs, dashboards, and alerts needed to detect and respond to issues fast.
• Automation: Reduce operational toil for the Migration Operations team by automating repetitive tasks, validations, and data integrity checks.
• Customer-Critical Delivery: Support migration windows during weekends and school holidays. Be flexible with working hours during peak onboarding cycles to ensure customers go live successfully.
• Technical Standards: Apply and uphold coding standards, write well-tested and reusable code, and engage with the architecture community to share best practices. Ensure services meet production readiness standards.
• Planning and Delivery: Provide accurate estimates and feasibility input on technical work. Deliver iteratively, contribute to release planning, and participate in post-release reviews.
• Incident Response: Lead investigations of failed or delayed migrations, perform root cause analysis, and drive follow-up improvements that prevent recurrence.
• Mentorship: Support and mentor fellow engineers, including Migration Operations Engineers, through code review, pairing, and constructive feedback. Share knowledge generously across the team.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Onboarding, Support, Product Managers, and other engineering teams to coordinate timelines, manage customer expectations, and align technical delivery with the wider onboarding strategy. Communicate risks, blockers, and status clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience: Considerable software engineering experience on production systems, ideally including data migration, ETL, or other data-heavy workloads.
• PHP: Strong hands-on experience building and maintaining PHP applications at scale; experience with frameworks such as Symfony is a strong plus.
• Databases: Solid understanding of relational databases (e.g., MSSQL, MySQL, AWS Aurora), SQL, data validation, and data integrity techniques.
• Cloud Systems: Hands-on expertise with AWS and distributed cloud architectures.
• Scripting: Strong skills in Python, Bash, or a similar language for automation, tooling, and data manipulation.
• Observability: Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability platforms (e.g., DataDog, Prometheus, or equivalent), plus incident and problem management practices.
• System Design: Solid understanding of distributed systems, batch and asynchronous processing, queues, and resilience patterns.
• CI/CD: Practical experience with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments.
• SLAs and Operational Metrics: Experience working to define SLAs, tracking operational metrics, and driving improvements in service reliability.
• Mentorship: Experience supporting and mentoring fellow engineers through code review, pairing, and feedback.
• Flexibility: Willingness to be flexible with working hours to support migration cycles that typically run over weekends and school holidays.
• AI and Productivity: Experience using agentic AI, or an interest in increasing productivity with new tooling including agentic AI.

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [email protected].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [email protected] 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [email protected].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [email protected] 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.