Salary: Competitive depending on experience

Location: 2-3 days on-site at our Harwell office with travel to client site when required

Contract type: Initial 3 month contract with the possibility of permanent and full-time permanent (please let us know your preference when applying) - 37.5 hours

A note from the Founders

Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.

We operate in some of the most complex and high‑stakes environments in the world - defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now, particularly around who we hire, will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.

This role is not about maintaining a hiring process. It is about building the talent engine of the company -setting the bar, shaping the culture and ensuring we bring in people who thrive under real responsibility and real mission pressure.

You will work closely with us and the leadership team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence strategy. And you will see the impact of your work every day in the calibre of the team we build.

If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters -we would love to hear from you.

Who We Are

Founded in 2020, Oxford Dynamics is a fast‑growing UK deep‑tech company developing AI and robotic systems designed to operate in mission‑critical environments.

Our flagship AVIS (A Very Intelligent System) AI framework fuses multi‑modal data - text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds - enabling operators to interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. Our STRIDER robotic platform performs autonomous tasks in hazardous environments, protecting people while extending operational reach.

Our ambition is simple but demanding: to converge AI and robotics so machines can sense, understand and act in complex, real‑world environments.

We work with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives.

What you will be doing here/ why this role matters

Oxford Dynamics is a small team who rely on a collaborative and positive approach and so the right attitude for this role is equally as important as experience. We are at an important stage and time in our growth, and as a Senior Full-Stack Engineer you will be an essential part of our success.

We seeking a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Backend specialism) to own mission-critical services and user-facing features that power our generative AI products. You will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems and contribute to frontend features as needed, taking features end to end from concept to production with clear SLAs and robust reliability.

You’ll partner closely with AI, product, and design to turn advanced AI capabilities into intuitive, reliable, and secure user experiences.

Key Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include, but not limited to:

Backend architecture &APIs (primary focus)

• Design and evolve scalable backend services in Python using FastAPI for high-availability, high-throughput workloads.
• Build well-versioned RESTful APIs aligned to OpenAPI/Swagger, with strong conventions for consistency, idempotency, and backward compatibility.
• Implement authentication and authorization using OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained permissions.
• Design and maintain event-driven architectures and background processing pipelines (e.g. Celery, Redis Streams, Kafka) to enable scalable async workloads, retries, and fault-tolerant integrations.
• Design data models and optimise relational databases (PostgreSQL) for performance, partitioning, and horizontal scale.
• Introduce caching, rate limiting, and queuing to meet performance budgets and latency goals.

Frontend contributions

• Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript as required.
• Work with product and design to take features end-to-end, from API through to UI.
• Help maintain a pragmatic frontend stack with a focus on shipping over perfection, without compromising on security.

Infrastructure contributions

• Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds.
• Contribute to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team
• Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod.

Security and reliability

• Write secure, well-tested code (unit, integration, end-to-end) and uphold coding standards through code reviews.
• Contribute to logging, metrics, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for the services you build.
• Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design.

Cross-functional and process

• Collaborate closely with the engineering team, product and leadership to scope, sequence, and deliver outcomes.
• Translate product requirements into technical plans, breaking work into milestones with measurable success criteria.
• Mentor engineers on backend design, API ergonomics.

Why This Role?

You’ll sit at the core of our product, building the systems and interfaces that make advanced AI usable in the real world. If you enjoy owning features end to end, care deeply about backend quality, and want enough frontend exposure to see your work directly impact users, this role offers both autonomy and real impact.

Requirements

What you can bring to Oxford Dynamics

A collaborative and supportive attitude to work is essential for this role.  You will be expected to operate at multiple levels within the company, with a strong focus on delivery and attention to detail. You will be comfortable working alone, supporting team members as well as interacting with clients if required.

Qualifications, experience and skills

• SC Clearance or the ability to obtain SC (and later DV).
• Proven experience in professional software engineering, with a strong focus on backend development in Python and with event-driven architectures.
• Proven experience designing and operating production REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger.
• Comfortable working in a React/TypeScript codebase.
• Deep understanding of relational database design, indexing, performance tuning, and migrations (PostgreSQL).
• Proficiency with containerisation (Docker) and Git-based workflows.

Soft skills

• High-agency engineer who owns outcomes end to end.
• Pragmatic, research-driven approach with a bias to ship and iterate.
• Clear communicator who can mentor, influence, and raise the bar for the team.
• Comfortable defining SLAs, making trade-offs explicit, and operating production systems.

Benefits

Why Oxford Dynamics?

Join the most exciting growth area in the UK: AI and Robotics!  Every member of the Oxford Dynamics team has a major impact on the products and services we provide. Regardless of job title, you’ll get to make a real difference and learn from colleagues about all areas of our business.

Benefits include:

• Salary: negotiable based on experience and attitudes

• Rapid career progression with meaningful ownership of core systems

• Opportunity to shape the future of a fast-growing, successful, early-stage business

Oxford Dynamics is committed to creating an inclusive team experience for all. Regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, or parental status, we believe our work is at its best when everyone feels free to be their authentic self.