How we work
Tes is a digital education company that has been supporting educators for over 100 years, powered by a community dedicated to helping, inspiring and connecting educators throughout the world. We have a simple mission that drives us – a great teacher for every child.
Remote First
At Tes, we solve problems and own products in mixed-discipline Product Teams. We work in a 'Remote First' style with engineers distributed across many locations and timezones. We work hard to make collaboration a success no matter where the team is located.
We hold a document that advises our teams and our business how we meet the challenge of working Remote First.
We also have a selection of Remote-Focused blog posts
Distributed Leadership
We also practice distributed leadership, where Project Parents, and Subject Champions take on the leadership and support of specific goals. They are supported by our Principal Engineers and Marco Bettiolo, our VP of Engineering.
Read more about the philosophy and structure of how we work.
Technology choices
Our platform is composed predominantly of Node and React micro-services. They run in Docker containers (orchestrated with Kubernetes) in AWS, alongside our core CMS built in Drupal. We follow a micro-services architectural approach with a bias towards slightly larger services focused on domain-specific functionality.
We have about 140 services in live maintained by 11 autonomous small but highly effective teams. We have a variety of data storage mechanisms including MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis. We use React Native for our native mobile apps.
Read a selection of our technology focused blog posts.
Owning what we write
We have over 140 micro-services that support the operation of tes.com. Each of these are owned by one of our teams who ensure that it continues to function correctly and to help our users reach their goals.
Our previous CTO, Clifton Cunningham summarises how we work with microservices at Tes in this video: