Role: Senior Software Engineer

Contract: Permanent

Flexible & Hybrid

Security clearance: You must be eligible for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC). We require applicants to hold UK passport and at least 5 years of continuous UK residency. We build frontier AI for environments where the cost of a wrong decision is high: defence and national security, critical infrastructure, and commercial organisations making high-stakes decisions on complex data. It is whether the systems we ship are positive enough for the people who stake decisions on them.

You will be trusted to own real systems end-to-end, held to a single high standard, and judged on one thing above all: whether what you ship earns the confidence people place in it when the decision matters.

Founded in 2019, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing both digital and physical AI systems built to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments.

At the core of everything we build is AVIS™ (A Very Intelligent System), our orchestration platform: the intelligence layer that fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, so operators can interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. AVIS™ powers our digital decision products, such as ORION for multi-source decision-to-effect, and it powers our physical platforms.

We partner with defence, security and private sector organisations internationally to bring frontier AI into the environments where it matters most, whether that is protecting nations, infrastructure and lives, or transforming how commercial organisations reason over their data and make high-stakes decisions.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with room to grow into staff-level scope. You will own significant parts of our platform end to end – design, build, ship, operate, and you will shape how the wider engineering team works:



the architecture we converge on, the standards we hold, and the engineers we grow.

Most of our backend is Python, our data lives in PostgreSQL, and everything ships in containers but if you have built serious systems elsewhere and want to work in this stack, we would still like to hear from you.

Design, build and evolve backend services for high-availability, high-throughput workloads – currently Python and FastAPI, though the principles matter more than the framework.

Design event-driven systems and background processing pipelines (queues, streams, workers) that handle retries, partial failure and back-pressure gracefully.

Model data properly and tune the databases behind it – schema design, indexing, query performance, migrations, and scaling strategy.

Apply caching, rate limiting and queuing to hit explicit performance and latency budgets.

Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and sane error and retry semantics.

Package and ship every service as a clean, minimal Docker container, with reproducible builds and sensible runtime defaults.

Write secure, well-tested code – unit, integration and end-to-end, and raise the bar for others through code review.

Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design rather than retrofitted controls.

Technical leadership

Translate product intent into technical plans: milestones, sequencing, measurable success criteria, and honest estimates.





Communicate clearly with stakeholders of varying technical background, including non-engineers and customers.

Contribute to infrastructure as code (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team.

Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and clean promotion across dev/staging/prod.

Strong hands-on experience with Docker and containerised deployment – building images, debugging containers, and running containerised services in production.

Strong programming ability in Python, or demonstrable depth in a comparable language with a willingness to work primarily in Python.

A track record of building and operating production backend systems at a level where you set the design, not just implemented it.

Proven experience designing and operating production APIs – versioning, security, documentation and automated testing.

Solid grounding in relational database design, indexing, performance tuning and migrations (PostgreSQL or equivalent).

Experience integrating with AI/ML systems or model-serving infrastructure.

Exposure to enterprise data platforms (for example Palantir Foundry, Databricks or Snowflake).

Prior experience as a technical lead, or as the senior engineer on a small team.

Pragmatic and research-driven, with a bias to ship and iterate.

A clear communicator, in writing as much as in conversation.

Join one of the most exciting growth areas in the UK: AI and robotics. Rapid career progression and personal growth

- Flexible working hours
- Company pension (NEST) with 4% employer contribution
- Private healthcare
- 29 days holiday plus public holidays

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.

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📌 Software engineer senior H/F (IT) (Oxford)
🏢 Oxford Dynamics
📍 Oxford