Job Opportunities API

Role: Senior Software Engineer - Backend Contract: Permanent Location: Greater Oxford Area / London Salary: Very Competitive 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 will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become. You will work closely with the entire team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day. 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 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, including STRIDER for CBRN operations and BARBARIAN for explosive ordnance disposal. The same brain reasons across the screen and the machine. We work where wrong decisions can be catastrophic, partnering with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives. What You Will Be Doing You'll sit at the core of our product, building the systems that make advanced AI usable in the real world. If you enjoy owning backend services end to end, care deeply about reliability and API quality, and want to work hands-on in a high-impact environment, this role offers both autonomy and real impact. Requirements 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. Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and robust error/retry semantics. Security & 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 & 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 and API ergonomics. Infrastructure Contributions (optional) 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 env