Backend Engineer for AI-Driven Hardware Platform

Orbital Industries; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbital is seeking a Backend Engineer to design, build and operate the core systems powering Curie. You will work across the full backend stack—APIs, data pipelines, graph databases, event-driven architectures and the infrastructure that connects AI models to researchers and engineers daily.

You will collaborate with ML researchers and domain experts to translate requirements into reliable backend solutions, improving observability and performance while maintaining high engineering standards.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and operating backend systems in production.
• Strong fundamentals in at least one backend language (Python/Go/Rust/Java/Kotlin) and comfortable across the stack.
• Experience with relational and/or graph databases, message queues, caching layers and cloud infrastructure.
• Track record of shipping reliable, maintainable software that users depend on.
• Ability to reason about system design, data modelling and engineering trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement APIs, services and data pipelines powering the Curie platform, focusing on reliability and performance.
• Own the full lifecycle of backend features from design through deployment, monitoring and iteration.
• Collaborate with ML researchers and domain experts to translate needs into robust backend solutions.

Skills

Backend engineering

APIs

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

Python

Go

Rust

Java/Kotlin

Databases

Cloud infrastructure

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Orbital is seeking a Backend Engineer to design, build and operate the core systems powering Curie. You will work across the full backend stack—APIs, data pipelines, graph databases, event-driven architectures and the infrastructure that connects AI models to researchers and engineers daily.

You will collaborate with ML researchers and domain experts to translate requirements into reliable backend solutions, improving observability and performance while maintaining high engineering standards.