Lead Software Engineer

Durlston Partners; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Durlston Partners is seeking a Lead Software Engineer in London to architect and own critical components of a flagship platform. The role focuses on real-time data fusion, low-latency communication, and robust distributed services, with a hands-on coding and leadership remit.

You will mentor junior engineers, drive design decisions, and ensure security and performance are baked into every layer of the system as the platform scales in demanding environments.

Qualifications

• Experience designing distributed systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance.
• Excellent problem-solving in real-time data processing.

Responsibilities

• Own a core technical domain of the flagship platform end to end, architecture, hard technical decisions, and delivery.
• Design distributed, fault tolerant services that stay correct and performant under adversarial, resource constrained, and intermittently connected conditions.
• Build the data layer that turns raw multi source sensor feeds into a coherent, real-time picture.
• Set the engineering bar: system design, code review, testing strategy, and the DevSecOps and database practices the team builds on.
• Operate as a player / coach, hands-on in the codebase daily, while mentoring and levelling up a small team of strong engineers.

Skills

C++

Rust

Java

Python

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Job description

Lead Software Engineer / Deep Tech / London (On-site) | up to £150k + equity

The company

A London deep tech company building the software backbone for the autonomous age. Their platform lets operators orchestrate fleets of robots, sensors and autonomous systems, fuse the vast data they generate, and turn it into decisions made faster than any adversary can react. Real systems, deployed in the world's most demanding environments, relied on when it actually matters. Well funded, scaling hard, and engineering led to the core.

The problem space

This is not CRUD. You'll be architecting systems that ingest and fuse high volume, heterogeneous sensor streams in real time, coordinate autonomous agents over unreliable and contested networks, and surface complex state to operators through interfaces that have to be right the first time. Think low latency distributed systems, resilience under partition, and correctness guarantees where the cost of a bug is not a bad quarter.

What you'll actually do

• Own a core technical domain of the flagship platform end to end, architecture, hard technical decisions, and delivery.
• Design distributed, fault tolerant services that stay correct and performant under adversarial, resource constrained, and intermittently connected conditions.
• Build the data layer that turns raw multi source sensor feeds into a coherent, queryable, real-time picture.
• Set the engineering bar: system design, code review, testing strategy, and the DevSecOps and database practices the team builds on.
• Operate as a player / coach, hands-on in the codebase daily, while mentoring and levelling up a small team of strong engineers.

The stack / the shape of you

You're deep in at least one server-side language, C++, Rust, Java or Python, and you reason fluently about concurrency, memory, and performance. You've designed distributed systems, not just used them. You care about the data layer (PostgreSQL and friends) and you think about security as a first class concern, not an afterthought. Bonus points for embedded / resource constrained targets, Kubernetes, streaming pipelines, or having shipped things that run somewhere hostile.

Managed small teams or mentored juniors, you could be an interesting fit.

The realities

• On site in London, by default. This team ships together in a room.
• Been in the UK for the last 5 years, in order to obtain the necessary qualification for the business.

The offer

Up to £150k base, meaningful equity, and the rare thing: a staff level seat where your architecture decisions ship into systems that matter, at a company early enough that you shape what it becomes.