Sr Software Engineer II

Axon; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 178,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology firm in London seeks an experienced architect to lead the cloud control plane for IoT devices, aiming to enhance emergency response systems. The role requires substantial expertise in distributed systems, leadership in technical strategy, and proficiency in security protocols. This opportunity offers a competitive salary, benefits, and a hybrid work model that promotes collaboration.

Benefits

Competitive salary and 401k with employer match

Discretionary paid time off

Paid parental leave

Medical, Dental, Vision plans

Fitness Programs

Learning & Development programs

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in building and operating distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in control planes and orchestration.
• Strong coding skills in Go and design-first mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own control-plane architecture for IoT fleets.
• Drive reliability, safety, and security-by-design.
• Lead cross-org technical strategy and mentor engineers.

Skills

Leadership in system design

Expertise in distributed systems

Proficient in Go

Experience in cloud-native environments

Understanding security protocols

Tools

Kubernetes

Service mesh (Istio/Envoy)

Kafka/NATS/Pub-Sub

Job description

Overview

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We pursue society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. We foster candor and care, seeking diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change while growing for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

About the Role

Axon’s Real Time Operations (RTO) division builds situational awareness software that helps emergency responders manage life-and-death incidents. You will lead the design and scale-out of the cloud control plane that provisions, secures, and orchestrates Axon’s global IoT device fleets. The systems you build will ingest and act on real-time signals at planet scale, with tight SLOs for command/response and device health. Your work will directly improve response times, reduce cognitive load for dispatch and command center operators, and increase responder safety.

What You’ll Do

Work Location: This role is based out of our London office and follows a hybrid schedule. We rely on in-person collaboration and ask that team members work onsite Tuesdays through Fridays, with the flexibility to work remotely on Mondays, unless there is an approved workplace accommodation. We believe that connection fuels innovation, and our in-office culture is designed to foster meaningful teamwork, mentorship, and shared success.

• Own control-plane architecture for multi-tenant, planet-scale IoT fleets: device provisioning and lifecycle, device identity & PKI, configuration/state management (twin/shadow), command & control, policy/RBAC enforcement, OTA updates and rollout strategies, and authoritative device state.
• Drive reliability, safety, and security-by-design: zero-trust defaults, mutual TLS, certificate rotation at scale, least-privilege key management (HSM/KMS), robust secrets hygiene, threat modeling, and defense-in-depth for multi-tenancy.
• Lead cross-org technical strategy: set engineering standards (APIs, versioning, deprecation, rollout, testing), create long-range roadmaps, and mentor/level-up senior engineers across cloud and device teams.
• Partner with device teams on transport and protocol choices, schema and API contracts, edge–cloud sync models, staged rollouts, failure injection, and field-safe rollback.
• Establish end-to-end observability (metrics, tracing, structured/audit logs), actionable dashboards, incident response runbooks, and capacity planning with empirical load testing and cost guardrails.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating distributed systems at scale; proven track record of owning critical paths and SLOs.
• Deep expertise in control planes, service discovery, orchestration, partitioning/placement, and consistency models(CAP tradeoffs, CRDTs, leader/follower, quorum).
• Strong coding in Go (also acceptable: Java/Rust); design-first mindset, profiling and performance tuning (allocations, tail latency, lock contention).
• Cloud-native foundations: Kubernetes, containers, service mesh (Istio/Envoy), gRPC/HTTP/2, backpressure and circuit-breaking patterns.
• Streaming/eventing: Kafka/NATS/Pub-Sub, schema evolution (Protobuf/Avro), idempotency keys, and exactly-once vs at-least-once tradeoffs.
• Security: mTLS, OAuth/OIDC, JWT, x.509, HSM/KMS, structured threat modeling and mitigation.

Preferred Qualifications

• IoT protocols & fleet ops: MQTT, WebSockets, device twin/shadow patterns and FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO).
• Hardware root of trust: TPM / TPM 2.0 fundamentals—measured/verified boot device identity & remote attestation, key sealing/unsealing—and integrating TPM-backed identity with cloud HSM/KMS.
• Large-scale telemetry pipelines, time-series storage, adaptive sampling, backpressure, and edge–cloud synchronization.
• Multi-region active/active, blue/green and canary for device fleets, ring-based or attribute-based rollout tooling with automatic pause/rollback.
• Experience in regulated or safety-critical domains (e.g., public safety, medical, automotive), with audit and compliance rigor.

Why Axon

• Mission you can see: Your work directly helps first responders move faster with clearer context, improving community safety.
• Scale and complexity: Build a global, multi-region control plane for millions of devices with tight SLOs and strict security.
• Growth: Influence technical strategy across cloud and device teams; mentor senior engineers; pursue Staff+ leadership paths.
• Compensation & support: Competitive pay and equity, comprehensive benefits and generous leave.
• Environment: “Own It“ culture that values engineering excellence, pragmatic safety-at-scale, and measurable outcomes.

Ready to lead at planet scale?

Apply to help us build the control plane that powers real-time operations for public safety worldwide.

Benefits that Benefit You

• Competitive salary and 401k with employer match
• Discretionary paid time off
• Paid parental leave for all
• Medical, Dental, Vision plans
• Fitness Programs
• Emotional & Mental Wellness support
• Learning & Development programs
• And yes, we have snacks in our offices

Benefits listed herein may vary depending on the nature of your employment and the location where you work.

The Pay: Axon is a total compensation company, meaning compensation is made up of base pay, bonus, and stock awards. The starting base pay for this role is between USD 148,500 in the lowest geographic market and USD 237,600 in the highest geographic market. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: level, function, training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, geographic market, and often a combination of all these factors. Our benefits offer an array of options to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. To see more details on our benefits offerings please visit www.axon.com/careers/benefits.

Don’t meet every single requirement? That’s ok. At Axon, we Aim Far. We think big with a long-term view because we want to reinvent the world to be a safer, better place. We are also committed to building diverse teams that reflect the communities we serve.

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they check every box in the job description. If you’re excited about this role and our mission to Protect Life but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification listed here, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Important Notes

The above job description is not intended as, nor should it be construed as, exhaustive of all duties, responsibilities, skills, efforts, or working conditions associated with this job. The job description may change or be supplemented at any time in accordance with business needs and conditions.

Some roles may also require legal eligibility to work in a firearms environment.

Axon’s mission is to Protect Life and is committed to the well-being and safety of its employees as well as Axon’s impact on the environment. All Axon employees must be aware of and committed to the appropriate environmental, health, and safety regulations, policies, and procedures. Axon employees are empowered to report safety concerns as they arise and activities potentially impacting the environment.

We are an equal opportunity employer that promotes justice, advances equity, values diversity and fosters inclusion. We’re committed to hiring the best talent — regardless of race, creed, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances — and empowering all of our employees so they can do their best work. If you have a disability or special need that requires assistance or accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email [e-mail]. Please note that this email address is for accommodation purposes only. Axon will not respond to inquiries for other purposes.