Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core)

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 exists to make aggression unaffordable.
Founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, UFORCE is a defence-technology company with operations across Europe, the United States and Asia.
UFORCE builds uncrewed vessels, ground robotics and aircraft, autonomy software, and the command-and-control layer that operates them together. Each platform is deployable on its own, and stronger as part of the system. Its product lines include the MAGURA family of uncrewed surface vessels, the NEMESIS family of strike platforms, the LIUT family of ground robotic platforms, and counter-UAS systems.

About the role

The Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core) will design, build, and operate the backend services and platform foundations that enable reliable, secure, and maintainable C2 operations across 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.

What you’ll do

• Own and ship critical Nova Core backend services (e.g., common APIs, configuration service, tenant/environment lifecycle, shared domain libraries).
• Design stable, backward-compatible API contracts (schemas, versioning, deprecation/migration playbooks) to protect dependent services and teams. Build and evolve data models and persistence layers, including schema evolution, migrations, correctness guarantees, and safe rollout strategies.
• Establish production-grade operability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts; write and maintain runbooks.
• Improve reliability over time by reducing incident frequency and driving down MTTD/MTTR through instrumentation and post-incident improvements.
• Implement secure-by-default backend patterns (least privilege, secret management, audit events, policy hooks) and make them reusable across teams.
• Contribute to and enforce consistent RBAC/permissions and authorization checks across services and APIs.
• Add security-focused tests and CI/CD gates informed by threat modeling to reduce regressions.
• Build and maintain shared backend libraries/SDKs with strong documentation and examples to accelerate adoption and reduce duplicated work.
• Improve developer experience: faster local workflows, environment parity (e.g., dockerized deps, seeded data), and rapid test feedback.
• Strengthen test harnesses (contract tests, integration tests, performance baselines) to catch cross-service breakages earlier.
• Diagnose and fix high-impact performance bottlenecks (latency hot paths, caching, concurrency, DB query efficiency) and introduce pragmatic performance budgets.
• Refactor brittle areas and pay down targeted technical debt to improve maintainability and reduce operational risk.
• Communicate trade-offs clearly and collaborate effectively with dependent engineering and product teams.

What success looks like

• Core Nova services are delivered, adopted, and operated reliably with clear SLIs/SLOs and runbooks.
• Observability is strong enough that incidents are detected quickly and resolved faster over time (improving MTTD/MTTR).
• API versioning and compatibility practices reduce integration churn and prevent breaking changes for dependent teams.
• Security and access-control foundations (authn/authz, auditability, secret handling, least privilege) are consistently applied across Nova Core services.
• Shared contracts, libraries, and SDKs meaningfully reduce duplicated service work and accelerate delivery across Nova modules.
• CI/CD and release processes enable safer, more frequent deployments of core services.
• Performance and correctness improve measurably in critical workflows (latency, resource usage, query efficiency, failure handling).
• Technical debt is paid down in targeted areas, improving maintainability and reducing operational risk.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems and services.
• Strong experience in API design, backend architecture, and evolving contracts safely over time.
• Solid data modeling and persistence experience (SQL and/or NoSQL), including migrations and schema evolution.
• Demonstrated operational ownership: observability, on-call readiness, incident response, and production debugging.
• Security-first backend engineering experience, including authn/authz patterns and audit/event design.
• Strong testing discipline (unit/integration/contract testing) and ability to build reliable systems under real-world constraints.
• Clear communication and cross-team collaboration skills; comfortable aligning stakeholders on architecture decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience building platform foundations for multi-service environments (shared libraries/SDKs, service templates, internal platforms).
• Experience with multi-tenant systems, tenant lifecycle management, and environment provisioning patterns.
• Experience with distributed systems reliability patterns (idempotency, retries, transactional workflows, consistency trade-offs).
• Experience with performance engineering (profiling, load testing, latency budgets) and cost-aware backend optimization.
• Experience in defence tech / C2/C4ISR / tactical systems, constrained deployments, or regulated/on-prem environments.

The nature of combat has changed.

Tomorrow’s battlefield success depends on autonomy, speed, and adaptability.

And UFORCE is ready.

Are You?