Oak National Academy

I was head of engineering at Oak National Academy for its first year. In response to the first UK lockdown, a group of teachers and tech folk got together to build a platform for hosting lessons, and I wrote the first code, staying up until 6am on the first day to get the site online. Five days after I joined, we launched a website with our first week of lesson videos: 250,000 users on day one, zero downtime. By the second wave of Covid, in early 2021, the site was supporting 4.5 million children a week learning from home.

I provided the technical leadership (think VP Engineering) on a tiny development team, leading the Classroom, Teacher Hub, Privacy, Content QA and WWW web apps (React, Next.js, Firebase, Cloudflare Workers, GraphQL). Over the summer of 2020 we built a production, ingest, transcode and delivery system providing an almost complete UK curriculum, around 10,000 lessons made by 500 teachers. I also led the architectural change enabling every UK mobile operator to zero-rate traffic, so children could learn on a phone without paying for data.

I was not on the founding team: I started as a volunteer, was then paid as a consultant, and later moved to a contract. I went back to Oak in 2024 to work on Aila, its AI lesson assistant.