Software Engineer

Oshen; Plymouth; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 70,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Job summary

Oshen in Plymouth is seeking a generalist software engineer to work across the stack, touching live robots, missions and factory tools.

You will collaborate with robot engineers, operators and scientists to build reliable services, planning interfaces and production tools that scale as the fleet grows. This role rewards curiosity, pragmatic engineering and rapid learning across the stack.

Qualifications

• Strong programming fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly across the stack.
• Experience with Node.js, web applications, SQL and cloud services (AWS).
• Familiarity with data visualisation or robotics/embedded systems is a plus.
• Interest in building reliable software used in live missions and production settings.

Responsibilities

• Build software across the stack: mission planning, data services, and control interfaces.
• Collaborate with robot engineers, operators, scientists and customers.
• Deliver features or automation that saves manual work and improves reliability.
• Maintain Node.js services and AWS infrastructure with good logging.
• Contribute to production tooling for fleet operations and testing.
• Design APIs, data models and schemas for sensor data arriving intermittently.

Skills

Node.js

Web apps

SQL

AWS

Data viz

Robotics/Embedded

Job description

Fifty robots are at sea tonight, spread across two oceans, and one pilot is flying all of them, through software you built. A constellation needs to recluster to map a search area before the weather closes in; the planner that works out how is yours. The data feed a government customer depends on hiccups at 2 a.m.; the pipeline that catches it, reroutes it and fixes it is yours too. Back in Plymouth, software in the factory: tracking every component, configuring every robot, testing each C-Star, you guessed it, you.

This is a broad software role for someone who wants their code to touch real robots, live missions and almost every part of a fast-growing company.

The role

You will build software across the stack: the tools used to plan and monitor missions, the services that move and interpret data, the interfaces for controlling robots over unreliable links, and the internal systems that let us manufacture and operate fleets efficiently. You will work directly with robot engineers, operators, scientists and customers. The right answer might be a polished product feature, a reliable backend service, or a small automation that removes hours of manual work.

What you might work on

• Improving our mission manager web app so operators can plan, monitor and debug live robot missions.
• Turning swarm control and autonomy research into reliable backend services with a clear interface on top.
• Building maps, time-series visualisations and control interfaces that make a large constellation understandable at a glance.
• Designing APIs, data models and SQL schemas for sensor data that arrives slowly, intermittently and sometimes out of order.
• Building internal tools for production, configuration, testing, logistics and fleet operations, so a small company can operate at much greater scale.
• Maintaining our Node.js services and AWS infrastructure, with logging and monitoring good enough that failures are visible and recoverable.
• Contributing to on-robot and edge software where it is useful, alongside the engineers who own the embedded systems.

What Oshen is

We make the ocean’s eyes and ears. We tell people what is happening across the 70% of the globe covered by ocean. We do this with C-Star constellations, swarms of one-metre wind-and-solar robots that sail the open ocean. Ours is the only surface robot to sail into a Category 5 hurricane and come back with the data. We design and build them in Plymouth and deploy them for the US Government, the Royal Navy and climate scientists, giving information across an ocean the modern world depends on and currently cannot see.

If we succeed, navies will find dark ships and underwater threats before they reach critical infrastructure. Governments will predict hurricanes and other extreme weather earlier. Scientists will better understand how the ocean and climate are changing.

The people joining now will shape both the technology and the company. Very few engineers get to take something from an idea in the workshop to a real mission in the Atlantic, then use what is learnt to make the next one better. Here, you can.

Who you are

• A generalist software engineer, from graduate level to around four years of experience. Evidence matters more than time served. You might come from a startup, robotics, scientific software, full-stack product engineering or infrastructure, or you may have built unusually serious things outside work.
• Strong programming and computer science fundamentals, and able to learn a new part of the stack without waiting for a specialist to appear.
• Comfortable moving between frontend, backend, data and infrastructure. Jack of all trades, master of some. You do not need to be equally strong everywhere, but you should enjoy understanding the whole system.
• You build software people actually use. You talk to users, ship a useful version and improve it from evidence rather than polishing in private.
• You write code that assumes things will fail, because 2,000 miles offshore they will. Weak connectivity, delayed data, retries and operator recovery are all part of the design.
• You are at the front of the field and know which tool to bring to bear, including AI coding tools, while still understanding, testing and owning the result.
• You communicate clearly with people who are not software engineers, and you leave code and decisions easier for the next person to pick up.
• You target your effort on the highest impact work from broader goals, without expecting a senior engineer to prioritise for you.
• Experience with Node.js, web applications, SQL, AWS, data visualisation, robotics or embedded systems is useful. We do not expect one person to arrive with all of it. Maritime experience is a plus but not essential.

Compensation

• Equity: £25,000 – £90,000 of stock options at our most recent company valuation, depending on experience, implemented through an EMI options scheme.