Senior Software Engineer (Digital Engineering & Semantic Data)
Senior software engineer on Leonardo UK's GCAP Enablers team building a graph-based 'Digital Thread' — an ontology-driven knowledge graph unifying engineering data across aerospace defence programmes — using the Semantic Web stack (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) and graph databases, with Python/Java/Node/TypeScript, on-site at Easter Howgate (Edinburgh).
- Compensation
- £45K–£60K / yr
- Location
- Easter Howgate, United Kingdom
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Part time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Proven expertise in a modern language (Python, Java, Node, or TypeScript)
- Experience handling data from heterogeneous, distributed sources
- Understanding of challenges of tenuously connected digital environments and distributed data
- Commitment to SOLID principles, maintainable architecture, and automated testing
- Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field, or equivalent professional experience
- Interest in Knowledge Engineering and thinking in relationships and abstractions
- Mindset prioritising composability and scalability over quick hard-coded fixes
- Eligibility for BPSS pre-employment screening and potentially National Security Vetting (SC or DV)
Nice to have
- Experience with Semantic Web stack (RDF, OWL, SPARQL)
- Experience with Graph Databases (Neo4j, GraphDB, Stardog, etc.)
Full description
Job Description
Salary Range:
Senior Engineer £45000 - £60000
Leonardo UK operates a grade-based salary framework with broad bands. The salary range shown reflects the approved grade band for this role, or a narrower hiring range published within that band, and is benchmarked against the external market. Exceptions above the standard range are managed through governance controls to protect internal equity.
Your Impact
Are you an experienced software engineer who enjoys tackling complex technical problems? Do you thrive in collaborative environments and want to contribute to the development of new capabilities that have a real impact across a wider business?
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the GCAP Enablers team and help develop innovative digital engineering capabilities that support the next generation of aerospace programmes. Working as part of a collaborative, multidisciplinary team, you will contribute to the design and development of software solutions that improve how engineering information is created, connected, and used across the product lifecycle.
You will work alongside software engineers, systems engineers, data specialists, and domain experts to solve complex challenges, while having opportunities to learn and apply modern technologies and approaches. This role is ideal for a software craftsman who is motivated by the challenge of building high-abstraction digital environments and is eager to apply their skills to a cutting-edge technical project.
What you’ll bring
You will help build the digital fabric that connects our distributed engineering landscape. By implementing a graph-based "Digital Thread," you will enable the seamless flow of enriched information across partners and teams, ensuring that our engineering ecosystem is resilient, scalable, and logically consistent.
- Implementing the Digital Thread: Developing software that transforms fragmented data from disparate sources into a unified, ontology-driven Knowledge Graph.
- Enabling Composable Engineering: Building a digital environment where relationships between engineering artefacts are first-class citizens, allowing for flexible and concurrent views of the system.
- Solving Distributed Interoperability: Creating mechanisms that allow tenuously connected environments and partners to contribute to a shared semantic representation without requiring rigid, point-to-point tool integration.
- Driving Strategic Adoption: Contributing to the overall strategy for the wider adoption of Knowledge Graphs and semantic technologies across the business to solve complex data challenges.