R-21 · CONTINUUM
LIVEDEGREE APPRENTICESHIP · NO DEGREE REQUIRED
Apprentice Software Engineer, Continuum
Four years, a degree at Queen Mary paid in full, and a graph engine most graduates never get anywhere near.
DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP · FOUR YEARS · FULL-TIME · HYBRID · LONDON · ONE DAY A WEEK AT QMUL
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£150,000
The group floor, from day one and for all four years. The same number everybody else here starts at.
EQUITY
None
This route is salary and the funded degree. It does not carry ownership, and we would rather say so here than at the offer stage.
THE APPRENTICESHIP
BSc (Hons) Digital and Technology Solutions, paid for in full
- LEVEL
- Level 6
- PATHWAY
- Software Engineer
- UNIVERSITY
- Queen Mary University of London
- DURATION
- Four years
Four days a week with your venture, one day a week at QMUL. Tuition paid in full. You finish with a degree, four years of production experience and no debt, and the end-point assessment is something we prepare you for rather than something that happens to you. Applications are rolling and there is no cohort deadline to miss.
01
The problem this role exists for
This is a Level 6 Digital and Technology Solutions degree apprenticeship on the Software Engineer pathway, run with Queen Mary University of London. Four days a week you are an engineer on Continuum; one day a week you are at QMUL. At the end you have a bachelor's degree, four years of production experience, and no debt.
Continuum is an unusually good place to learn to program properly, because the problems here are algorithmic and visible. Work is stored as a graph, consequence is computed rather than debated, and a great deal of what makes the product good is a data structure behaving well under pressure. You will see the connection between what you study on Wednesdays and what you write on Thursdays more often than most apprentices do.
More on the company itself: Continuum →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first fortnight ends with something of yours in production, reviewed by the person who will keep working with you. Small and real. We would rather you broke something recoverable in week one than read documentation for a month, and your mentor sits close enough to catch a decision going wrong.
A normal week is four days on the product and one at QMUL, and the university day is genuinely protected. On the other four: building, a review with somebody who read your code rather than a summary of it, and the same direct line to the founder as anyone else. Coursework happens in work hours.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
TypeScript end to end, Postgres underneath, and a canvas renderer doing the visual half. You are not expected to know any of it on day one, only to learn it quickly with somebody experienced watching.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
A real surface
Something that ships and that customers touch, inside the first fortnight.
02
Your degree
Fees paid in full, one protected day a week, coursework in work hours.
03
A named mentor
One person whose job includes you, rather than a rota.
04
The same review
Your code is read by whoever will maintain it. That does not change because you are new.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸Eligible for a Level 6 apprenticeship in England, with the right to work in the UK
- ▸Three A-levels or an equivalent Level 3 qualification, plus GCSE English and Maths at grade 4 or above. QMUL confirms the exact criteria, and contextual offers are taken seriously
- ▸One thing you have made that you can talk about for twenty minutes without getting bored
- ▸No degree, and no prior professional experience. Both of those are the point rather than a gap
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Any programming at all. Entirely self-taught is in no way a disadvantage here
- ▸An interest in how things are structured: puzzles, systems, maps, anything with dependencies in it
- ▸Evidence that you finish things, which is considerably rarer than evidence you can start them
- ▸A reason for this group specifically, rather than an employer with a bigger apprenticeship intake
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. This route exists specifically for people without a degree, and there is no expectation of prior professional experience. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£150,000 base, which is the group floor and the same number everybody else here starts on. There is no equity attached to this route: the apprenticeship is the salary and the funded degree, and ownership is not part of it. We would rather you knew that from the advert than found it out at the offer stage.
University fees are paid in full and there is no student debt attached to this route. Everything else is what the whole group gets, with no junior tier: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. This apprenticeship is a UK route and requires the right to work here, so the sponsorship map does not apply to it.
06
Apply for this role
Three steps rather than four: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, a short practical exercise that assumes you have never done this professionally, and a working session on what you made. A decision within a week of that session, and QMUL handles its own admissions step alongside ours.