Senior Backend Engineer for AI-Driven Hardware Platform

Orbital; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Orbital is seeking a Backend Engineer to design and operate the core systems powering Curie, integrating AI models and building scalable APIs and data pipelines for our AI-first industrial platform.

You will collaborate with ML researchers and hardware/domain experts, own features end-to-end, and contribute to high engineering standards through testing, monitoring and thoughtful design.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, building and operating backend systems in production.
• Strong programming fundamentals in at least one backend language(s).
• Experience with relational and/or graph databases and message queues.
• Ability to reason about system design and engineering trade-offs.
• Interest in building software for scientific and industrial applications.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement APIs, services and data pipelines powering Curie, with a focus on reliability, performance and clean abstractions.
• Own the full lifecycle of backend features from design through deployment, monitoring and iteration.
• Improve observability, reliability and performance — instrument, monitor and optimise the systems you build.
• Collaborate with ML researchers, product engineers and domain experts to translate needs into robust backend solutions.
• Share knowledge, mentor peers and help establish best practices as the team grows.

Skills

API design

Distributed systems

Backend programming

Python/Go/Rust/Java

Databases

CI/CD

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Job description

Orbital is seeking a Backend Engineer to design and operate the core systems powering Curie, integrating AI models and building scalable APIs and data pipelines for our AI-first industrial platform.

You will collaborate with ML researchers and hardware/domain experts, own features end-to-end, and contribute to high engineering standards through testing, monitoring and thoughtful design.