Junior Developer at Snapplify

At Snapplify, we're increasing access to digital education and empowering educators to transform their classrooms for the 21st century. We need a Junior Developer to join our growing team. This is a career-defining first move into a high-growth edtech scale-up. You'll learn your craft properly, on a real product, and help us grow our impact across Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Our team believes in making a real, measurable impact. We're known for being innovative and have a hardworking team of experts who are incredible to work alongside. We move fast, with a bias towards action. If you're ambitious, driven, and want to be taught by people who know what they're doing, our team might be for you.

So what are we looking for?

We're looking for a Junior Developer at the start of their career who wants to get very good, quickly. If you are someone who:

• Communicates well, verbally and in writing


• Asks questions early rather than guessing


• Chooses to learn, and strives for mastery


• Gets things done on time, without a diva attitude


• Uses AI tooling thoughtfully - to work faster and learn, never as a substitute for understanding your own code


• Takes code review as a gift, not a personal attack


• Wants to contribute across the whole SDLC over time, not just write code


• Shares our vision and mission

Our Tech Stack includes (but not limited to)

• Kotlin and Java


• Spring Boot / Spring Framework


• Hibernate JPA


• MySQL


• Thymeleaf - with JSP still in our older code, which we're actively migrating


• Gradle, NPM or similar dependency knowledge


• AWS (EC2, load balancers, SQS), nginx, Cloudflare


• Bitbucket, Jira and Xray


• JUnit and Playwright


• Postman


• AI development tooling - Claude Code and similar, used properly and daily


• CSS / SCSS / Less


• HTML


• JSON, CSV, XML

You won't know all of this on day one. Nobody does.

What will you be required to do?

• Build features for our customers and internal tools for our teams, with support and review


• Produce quality code, and learn what "quality" means here


• Write tests for what you build


• Fix bugs, including the unglamorous ones, and learn the product properly in the process


• Use our AI tooling to work faster - while being able to explain and defend every line you commit


• Help move our older JSP pages across to Thymeleaf


• Attend daily stand-up, sprint kick-off and retrospectives within an Agile/SCRUM environment


• Be responsible and accountable for the delivery of work that you have committed to


• Continuously improving your knowledge, at work and at home


• Learn to break down user stories into tasks and estimations


• Work in a peer code-reviewed environment. You review my code, I review yours


• Become a tech evangelist for systems that make you happy

What skills/knowledge and experience will impress us?

• 2 - 5 years of experience in a similar role


• A grounding in an object-oriented language - Java or Kotlin ideally, but C# or similar counts


• Good SQL database experience and SQL construction


• Solid understanding of git and how to use it in your daily workflow


• Any hands-on experience with unit testing frameworks like JUnit


• Any exposure to end-to-end testing tools such as Playwright


• Working knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS (Standard LESS, SCSS or compiled CSS)


• Evidence you can finish things - a degree, diploma, bootcamp, or a portfolio of your own projects. We're genuinely open on the route


• Any exposure to Spring or Spring Boot


• Experience with product development tools (i.e. Jira)


• Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, and a clear sense of where they help and where they mislead you


• Experience in E-Reading, E-Readers

What can you expect working at Snapplify?

• Competitive salary


• Hybrid working


• Structured mentoring - you won't be thrown in the deep end


• A flat organizational structure with a focus on teamwork and continuous learning


• A fast-paced and challenging environment that will keep you on your toes


• An environment where your input and ideas matter