Software Technical Lead

About Us

We build mission-critical software for the defence and aerospace sectors. Our teams bring together software engineers, RF and electronics specialists, and domain experts to deliver turnkey solutions for problems with no off-the-shelf answer, across tactical radios, radar systems, and applied research.

Much of our work sits around the systems that produce signal and sensor data — building the software that generates, validates, analyses, and visualises that data at scale. The common thread is volume under time pressure, and interfaces that let operators and analysts act on what they are seeing immediately.

About the Role

We're looking for a hands-on Software Tech Lead to own the architecture and lead development of real-time, data-intensive systems across several projects — backend services and visualisation-heavy frontends.

You'll set technical direction, own architectural decisions, review designs and code, and mentor the engineers around you — while still building the hard parts yourself. Your leverage comes from the quality of your technical judgement and how much you raise the level of the people you work with.

What You'll Do

System design & architecture

• Own the architecture end to end — services, data flow, storage, and the backend/frontend contract.
• Design real-time pipelines that hold up as data volume, concurrent sources, and complexity grow.
• Make and document the consequential calls: service boundaries, streaming versus batch, data modelling, where to spend the latency budget.

Hands-on engineering

• Build backend services and APIs that process large volumes of sensor and signal data at low latency.
• Implement the data-processing and analytics logic that turns raw data into real-time insight.
• Work with event streaming (Kafka) and caching / inter-service communication (Redis).
• Build and optimise data-heavy frontend features — dashboards, charts, live visualisations — including state management and performance work for large datasets and live updates.

Technical leadership & mentorship

• Set technical direction and bring the team along with the reasoning behind it.
• Review designs and code for correctness, performance, and maintainability — using review as a teaching mechanism, not a gate.
• Mentor engineers through hard problems, and raise the bar on testing, instrumentation, and the practices that keep a real-time system debuggable under pressure.

Delivery & collaboration

• Break requirements into workstreams and sequence them by priority, risk, and technical dependency.
• Run sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, keeping the team unblocked and the plan honest.
• Work with data scientists, electronics engineers, and UI/UX to turn requirements into designs.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• Full-stack depth, currently hands-on. You're building across backend and frontend today, with real depth in distributed systems, high-throughput processing, and SQL or equivalent.
• System design at scale. You've shipped systems where architecture was the deciding factor, and can walk us through the tradeoffs you weighed.
• Full-lifecycle ownership. You've taken multiple projects from requirements through design, build, release, and maintenance.
• Technical leadership. A team's technical direction has run through you — via design review, mentorship, and credibility rather than reporting lines.
• Languages. Hands-on in one or more of C++, C# or Python, plus familiarity with React or Angular. We work across projects with different stacks, so breadth counts.
• Core stack. Production experience with event streaming and caching in a real-time pipeline (Kafka and Redis, or equivalents), and with data-intensive frontends.
• Experience. Bachelor's in Computer Science, Electronics, or equivalent practical experience, plus 6+ years including substantial real-time or data-intensive work.

Nice to have

• Exposure to defence, aerospace, or another mission-critical regulated domain.
• Familiarity with sensor or signal-data concepts — enough to hold a productive conversation with our electronics engineers.
• Experience with time-series data stores, or binary / columnar formats for moving large datasets efficiently.
• Experience introducing an architectural change into a live system without a rewrite.

Why Join Us

• Problems that resist easy answers. Real-time constraints, large-scale sensor data, and operational reliability requirements — on systems that get used.
• Architectural ownership from day one. Real design authority, not a role where the important decisions were made elsewhere.
• Depth alongside domain experts. You'll work directly with electronics and RF engineers, and pick up domain context that's hard to come by elsewhere.