Senior Migrations Engineer

Location: Remote

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

About us

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. 

About the role

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.

About you

• 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.