Senior Software Engineer

Experis UK; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Experis UK is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build next-generation AI systems utilized in Defence, Security, and Resilience domains. The role involves developing multimodal data fusion platforms and requires collaboration with senior technical leadership and various teams.

The ideal candidate should have over 7 years of experience in software engineering, a strong proficiency in Python, and systems design expertise. Experience in container orchestration and AI frameworks is preferred.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and delivering production-grade software systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration and deployment across varied infrastructure environments.
• Experience architecting systems handling multiple data modalities.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core platform components across the AI and data stack.
• Develop distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve diverse multimodal datasets.
• Influence engineering standards and architectural decisions.

Skills

Production-level proficiency in Python

Strong systems design expertise

Experience leading technical initiatives

Excellent communication skills

Tools

Container orchestration

AI/agent frameworks

Job description

About the Role

Senior Software Engineer — AI & Multimodal Data Platforms

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help design and build next-generation AI systems used in Defence, Security, and Resilience environments. You will work on a cutting-edge multimodal data fusion platform that transforms large-scale information streams into operational decision advantage.

This role is ideal for a strong generalist engineer who enjoys working across distributed systems, AI infrastructure, semantic data representation, deployment engineering, and agentic AI architectures. You will take major platform components from concept through production, influence architectural direction, and help deliver systems capable of operating across cloud, edge, on-premise, and air-gapped environments.

You will collaborate closely with senior technical leadership, platform engineers, security stakeholders, and mission-focused teams to deliver robust, scalable, production-grade software.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate core platform components across the AI and data stack.
• Develop distributed systems that ingest, transform, and serve diverse multimodal datasets.
• Contribute to the development of agent frameworks and AI orchestration systems.
• Help define deployment architectures spanning managed cloud, customer cloud, edge, on-premise, and air-gapped infrastructure.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to standardise scalable data platform solutions.
• Work closely with security stakeholders to implement strong access control, data protection, and system integrity practices.
• Influence engineering standards, architectural decisions, and technology selection across the organisation.
• Support customer-facing mission deployments where required.

What We’re Looking For

Required Experience

• 7+ years building and delivering production-grade software systems at scale.
• Strong systems design expertise with the ability to balance performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Production-level proficiency in Python.
• Experience architecting systems handling multiple data modalities.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration and deployment across varied infrastructure environments.
• Recent experience building with AI/agent frameworks.
• Strong API design and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.
• Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams and systems.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in Defence, Security, Intelligence, or other high-assurance environments.
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, NLP, semantic data models, or computational linguistics.
• Experience deploying systems in constrained or disconnected environments.
• Expertise using AI-assisted development tooling such as Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex.