Technical Project Manager

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation is looking for a confident and flexible Technical Project Manager for an 18 month opportunity. The Technical Project Manager will have demonstrable experience in successfully delivering technical projects within agreed scope, timeline, budget, and quality requirements. You will help us positively impact students, teachers, and partners around the world. 

This is an opportunity to join the team evolving the micro:bit hardware, of which 12 million have been distributed globally to date. The role will involve working across both the hardware itself and the software that brings it to life. Reporting to the Programme Manager and collaborating with a multi-disciplined team, you will guide micro:bit hardware through all stages of design and development, keeping the software moving in step. 

The Foundation is a small team, which means you will be involved in and driving every aspect of project management — requirements definition, building and tracking schedules,  driving delivery, quality, reporting and risk management, along with scope, timeline, budget and resource management. In several of these areas you will also be improving our development and release processes, so we are looking for someone with the initiative and care to get things right. 

This role is hybrid with a requirement to work from our Oxford office two days per week, with the remaining time home based, so you will need to be comfortable working remotely, and managing your own time effectively, whilst we are keen to be flexible and adaptable. You will also travel occasionally — for example, to meet component suppliers or to support or oversee production runs. 

Responsibilities 

Working with the Programme Manager and the wider project team, you will co-ordinate delivery across the entire lifecycle of micro:bit products.  

You will: 

• Develop technical project management systems in line with and within the Foundation programme management governance framework ensuring appropriate documentation is developed and maintained. 

• Create clear project deliverables and KPIs; continuously measure and report on their status throughout development 

• Determine and apply risk management effectively, maintaining and adding to the risk register, and escalating as per the programme management governance framework 

• Communicate with stakeholders effectively to achieve shared aims 

• Identify and work with Product or Service Owners to define work packages. 

• Work with highly skilled engineering teams, both inside and outside the Foundation, communicating hardware and software concepts with confidence. 

• Familiarity with engineering change processes and configuration management.  

• Work with highly motivated education specialists to create products and services. 

• Drive and negotiate effectively with suppliers, such as test houses, designers, manufacturers and software houses. 

• Ensure robust test planning, testing resources and traceability so that we deliver quality products. 

• Co-ordinate compliance activities (for instance review against GDPR, or certification planning) in partnership with the Product & Compliance Manager, who holds the relationships with test houses and is ultimately responsible for the compliance strategy. 

• Introduce and adapt new processes to meet the Foundation’s evolving requirements. 

• Manage handovers and transitions to other team members as appropriate.

Across these activities you will co-ordinate work through each project phase: 

• Concept & Feasibility: translating ideas and high-level plans into detailed delivery plans, defining requirements, running feasibility studies and high-level architectural planning. 

• Development & Prototyping: co-ordinating iteration rounds, debugging and initial builds. 

• Validation & Testing: co-ordinating reliability testing, regulatory compliance and design revisions. 

• Ramp & Delivery: working with the Production & Manufacturing Manager to progress from a finished design to mass production. 

We are looking for a technical project manager with a passion for co-ordinating people to get things done.  

The right person works well both independently and as part of a small team, knows how to be pragmatic and choose where compromises can and can’t be made, with experience and expertise in: 

• Project managing hardware products: covering all aspects of the development cycle and supply chain, including component and supplier selection, PCB design, software, packaging and documentation, from initial prototype production runs, through to volume manufacture; or 

• Delivering electronic products that require tight integration between hardware design, firmware and higher-level software (for example, PC-based tooling) across project phases. 

• Applying a range of hardware and software development lifecycle methods (waterfall, iterative and agile), and balancing the agile world of software development with the more waterfall world of hardware so that a quality hardware product is delivered and software can be iterated on top of it. 

• Project management qualification such as Prince2, Agile, PMP or MSP desired but not essential   

• Using standard project scheduling tools such as monday.com and GitHub. 

• A strong communicator - we  value empathetic and effective communication, the ability to work autonomously to achieve project objectives, and a collaborative approach to working with internal teams, external organisations and partners. 

If you don’t feel you match all of these requirements but are excited about the role, please still apply and use your covering letter to explain the areas where you might need support or would like to develop your experience. 

The impact you’ll have 

There are now more than 12 million micro:bits in use around the world, and we estimate that more than 74 million children have learned to code with the BBC micro:bit. We have achieved this by working closely with engineering teams at global partners including Arm, Microsoft, MIT and Nominet — for example, last year we deployed micro:bits into more than 90% of UK primary schools in a project with Nominet and the BBC. 

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation is a UK-based not-for-profit with the goal to inspire every child to create their best digital future (https://microbit.org/about/). One of the greatest benefits of working here is knowing that your work contributes to something positive and constructive, with beneficial social outcomes. We are a small organisation with a large audience and reach, and we thrive on creative problem solving — which gives each person the chance to have enormous impact while ensuring the days are diverse and the challenges complex. 

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation is committed to improving the diversity of our team. We actively seek and welcome applications from women, and from all sections of the community. 

Location – Home based and Oxford, UK (hybrid)

This is an 18 month opportunity. For this role, we believe there is value in face-to-face collaboration. We expect this role to be in the office 2 days per week in our Oxford office on average. However, if you are not local to Oxford and are really excited about this opportunity, we would still love to hear from you.

Once probationary period is complete, contractual benefits include options to join group private medical and group life insurance plan, EAP plan, flexibility in working hours, flexible annual leave policy (taking at minimum 25 days a year not including national holidays and Foundation closures) and competitive pension contributions.

Flexibility

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation is a flexible employer and we love to support our team to work around other commitments in their lives, and we have a track-record of doing this. Please get in touch if you’re interested in this role but you require different working arrangements.

This is a full time role but we would also consider candidates working 4 days a week on a pro-rata basis (a choice common across the team)

Salary

£53,000 - £59,000 depending on experience

Application & recruitment schedule

Please send us a copy of your CV and a covering letter explaining your suitability for the role. Please note applications without a covering letter will not be progressed.

The closing date for this role will be 6pm on the 14th August, UK time. We will be conducting initial zoom interviews from the week commencing 17th August, and face to face interviews at our Oxford office the week of the 1st September.  

We monitor our performance on hiring diversity, using a questionnaire at the end of the application process. This is viewed by the operations team only, the aggregated data is shared with the wider team. The questionnaire is optional and you have the choice to not answer any question, but is hugely valuable for us to understand our performance in this area. The questionnaire can be accessed by clicking on this link: https://form.jotform.com/262013464650349

Applicants must have the right to live and work in the UK.