Nexa School - Founding Engineer / Technical Lead

We're building a new kind of secondary school: AI-powered academics in ~2 hours each morning, real-world projects the rest of the day.

Secondary schools still run on industrial-era timetables and one‑size‑fits‑all curricula, leaving too many teenagers disengaged, anxious, and underprepared for the real world. Nexa School is a new secondary school model that blends ~2 hours/day adaptive learning with 1:5 coaching and real‑world projects, powered by a privacy‑by‑design platform that gives every student a personalised path without creeping on their data.

We need someone to build the first version of Nexa Core - the intelligence layer that connects curriculum, content providers, and coaches. We want something that works, has solid foundations, proves the learning loop, and doesn't paint us into long term corners.

Curriculum-to-content stitching : Map IB and/or UK curriculum objectives to third-party content (videos, exercises, platforms) via LTI/APIs. Swappable, not hardcoded.

Next-best-lesson logic: Simple, explainable rules-based recommender (completion, performance, human overrides). No heavy ML yet - we want to understand what's happening.

Human dashboard : Daily summary per user/group - who's stuck, who's flying, who's gone quiet. Space for notes and safeguarding flags.

Privacy-by-design : Data minimisation, clear audit trails, easy export/delete, UK GDPR compliant from day one.

A working system we can use with a small pilot group over summer. If we can show a student progressing faster than expected through a subject using this system, that's the unlock.

You care about education and find this problem genuinely interesting

You've built MVPs before and know the difference between "good enough" and "technical debt bomb"

You're comfortable with ambiguity and can make sensible decisions without a 50-page spec

You have serious engineering experience (5+ years) - we're not looking for someone who'll vibe-code their way through this with Cursor and hope for the best (although we love good vibes and vibe coding has a place)

You can architect an AI-first stack properly: LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, LTI/API orchestration - and you understand the trade-offs between building vs. buying

You've worked with external APIs and content providers before and know how to build systems that don't break when a third party changes something

You think about data architecture, privacy, and compliance as foundational, not afterthoughts

Contract/freelance to start, with genuine potential to become a founding technical role

Competitive day rate or retainer - let's talk

Equity conversation available for the right person

Timeline: MVP by April 2026

Sophie Deen + Partners - Sophie built Bright Little Labs into a Warner Bros-backed edtech, helped to introduce the computing curriculum to UK schools, wrote the award-winning Agent Asha spy book series, and advises UK Parliament on AI policy. Two exits. Now she's building Nexa alongside a small, deliberate team of founders and builders who've done this before - people who believe AI can and should transform education for good, not just make a broken system run faster.

More context: nexa.school (early landing page - we're building in the open)

Please send us:

One paragraph (5 sentences) on why this problem interests you personally

One thing in this brief you'd push back on or do differently, and why; or one thing you’re really excited about

A link to something you've built that you're proud of

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If you use AI, please make sure your human self edits out the slop (IYKYK!) ☺️