Senior Backend Engineer, Nova Core Platform

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

Job summary

UFORCE, a London-headquartered defence-tech company, is seeking a Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core) to design, build, and operate backend services that power Nova Cloud deployments. This role focuses on the Nova Core “inner loop”: service architecture, APIs, data models, persistence, authn/authz, observability, and developer experience that other Nova modules and product teams depend on.

You will own API contracts, data models, authentication/authorization, observability, and developer

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems.
• Strong experience in API design and backend architecture.
• Solid data modeling and persistence experience (SQL/NoSQL).
• Demonstrated operational ownership: observability, on-call readiness, incident response.
• Security-first backend engineering experience (authn/authz, auditing).
• Strong testing discipline (unit/integration/contract).
• Clear communication and cross-team collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Own and ship critical Nova Core backend services (e.g., common APIs, configuration service, tenant/environment lifecycle).
• Design stable, backward-compatible API contracts and evolve data models with safe migrations.
• Establish production-grade operability: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerts, runbooks.
• Improve reliability by reducing incidents and optimizing MTTR/MTTD through instrumentation and post-incident reviews.
• Implement secure-by-default backend patterns and reusable RBAC checks across services.
• Contribute to and enforce consistent RBAC/permissions and authorization checks across services.
• Add security-focused tests and CI/CD gates informed by threat modeling.
• Build and maintain shared libraries/SDKs with documentation and examples.
• Improve developer experience: faster local workflows and environment parity.
• Strengthen test harnesses to catch cross-service issues early.
• Diagnose and fix performance bottlenecks and implement performance budgets.
• Refactor tech debt to improve maintainability and reduce risk.

Skills

Backend architecture

API design

Data modeling

Security engineering

Observability

RBAC/authorization

Contract testing

Job description

UFORCE, a London-headquartered defence-tech company, is seeking a Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core) to design, build, and operate backend services that power Nova Cloud deployments. This role focuses on the Nova Core “inner loop”: service architecture, APIs, data models, persistence, authn/authz, observability, and developer experience that other Nova modules and product teams depend on.

You will own API contracts, data models, authentication/authorization, observability, and developer