Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core)
Senior/Staff role designing and operating backend services for a defence-tech command-and-control platform. Responsibilities include API design, data modeling, security (authn/authz), and observability to support uncrewed vessels and robotics.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- United Kingdom - London
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years building and operating production backend systems and services
- Strong experience in API design, backend architecture, and evolving contracts
- Solid data modeling and persistence experience (SQL and/or NoSQL)
- Demonstrated operational ownership: observability, on-call, incident response
- Security-first backend engineering experience (authn/authz patterns)
- Strong testing discipline (unit/integration/contract testing)
- Clear communication and cross-team collaboration skills
Nice to have
- Experience building platform foundations for multi-service environments
- Experience with multi-tenant systems and environment provisioning
- Experience with distributed systems reliability patterns
- Experience with performance engineering (profiling, load testing)
- Experience in defence tech / C2/C4ISR / tactical systems
Full description
UFORCE exists to make aggression unaffordable.
Founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, UFORCE is a defence-technology company with operations across Europe, the United States and Asia.
UFORCE builds uncrewed vessels, ground robotics and aircraft, autonomy software, and the command-and-control layer that operates them together. Each platform is deployable on its own, and stronger as part of the system. Its product lines include the MAGURA family of uncrewed surface vessels, the NEMESIS family of strike platforms, the LIUT family of ground robotic platforms, and counter-UAS systems.
About the role
The Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core) will design, build, and operate the backend services and platform foundations that enable reliable, secure, and maintainable C2 operations across Nova Cloud deployments. This role focuses on the Nova Core “inner loop”: service architecture, APIs, data models, persistence, authn/authz, observability, and developer experience that other Nova modules and product teams depend on.
What you’ll do
- Own and ship critical Nova Core backend services (e.g., common APIs, configuration service, tenant/environment lifecycle, shared domain libraries).
- Design stable, backward-compatible API contracts (schemas, versioning, deprecation/migration playbooks) to protect dependent services and teams. • Build and evolve data models and persistence layers, including schema evolution, migrations, correctness guarantees, and safe rollout strategies.
- Establish production-grade operability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts; write and maintain runbooks.
- Improve reliability over time by reducing incident frequency and driving down MTTD/MTTR through instrumentation and post-incident improvements.
- Implement secure-by-default backend patterns (least privilege, secret management, audit events, policy hooks) and make them reusable across teams.
- Contribute to and enforce consistent RBAC/permissions and authorization checks across services and APIs.
- Add security-focused tests and CI/CD gates informed by threat modeling to reduce regressions.
- Build and maintain shared backend libraries/SDKs with strong documentation and examples to accelerate adoption and reduce duplicated work.
- Improve developer experience: faster local workflows, environment parity (e.g., dockerized deps, seeded data), and rapid test feedback.
- Strengthen test harnesses (contract tests, integration tests, performance baselines) to catch cross-service breakages earlier.
- Diagnose and fix high-impact performance bottlenecks (latency hot paths, caching, concurrency, DB query efficiency) and introduce pragmatic performance budgets.