Job Specifications
Salary: Competitive depending on experience
Location: 2-3 days on-site at our Harwell office with travel to client site when required
Contract type: Initial 3 month contract with the possibility of permanent and full-time permanent (please let us know your preference when applying) - 37.5 hours
A note from the Founders
Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.
We operate in some of the most complex and high‑stakes environments in the world - defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now, will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.
You will work closely with all the team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day in the work we do.
If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters -we would love to hear from you.
Who We Are
Founded in 2020, Oxford Dynamics is a fast‑growing UK deep‑tech company developing AI and robotic systems designed to operate in mission‑critical environments.
Our flagship AVIS (A Very Intelligent System) AI framework fuses multi‑modal data - text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds - enabling operators to interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. Our STRIDER robotic platform performs autonomous tasks in hazardous environments, protecting people while extending operational reach.
Our ambition is simple but demanding: to converge AI and robotics so machines can sense, understand and act in complex, real‑world environments.
We work with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives.
What you will be doing here/ why this role matters
Oxford Dynamics is a small team who rely on a collaborative and positive approach and so the right attitude for this role is equally as important as experience. We are at an important stage and time in our growth, and as a Senior Full-Stack Engineer you will be an essential part of our success.
We seeking a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Backend specialism) to own mission-critical services and user-facing features that power our generative AI products. You will design, build, and operate scalable backend systems and contribute to frontend features as needed, taking features end to end from concept to production with clear SLAs and robust reliability.
You'll partner closely with AI, product, and design to turn advanced AI capabilities into intuitive, reliable, and secure user experiences.
Key Responsibilities
Your responsibilities will include, but not limited to:
Backend architecture &APIs (primary focus)
Design and evolve scalable backend services in Python using FastAPI for high-availability, high-throughput workloads
Build well-versioned RESTful APIs aligned to OpenAPI/Swagger, with strong conventions for consistency, idempotency, and backward compatibility
Implement authentication and authorization using OAuth2/OIDC, session management, and fine-grained permissions
Design and maintain event-driven architectures and background processing pipelines (e.g. Celery, Redis Streams, Kafka) to enable scalable async workloads, retries, and fault-tolerant integrations
Design data models and optimise relational databases (PostgreSQL) for performance, partitioning, and horizontal scale
Introduce caching, rate limiting, and queuing to meet performance budgets and latency goals
Integrate with AI pipelines and model-serving endpoints, including streaming responses, async inference jobs, and robust error/retry semantics
Frontend contributions
Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TypeScript as required
Work with product and design to take features end-to-end, from API through to UI
Help maintain a pragmatic frontend stack with a focus on shipping over perfection, without compromising on security
Infrastructure contributions
Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds
Contribute to IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the DevOps team
Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod
Security and reliability
Write secure, well-tested code (unit, integration, end-to-end) and uphold coding standards through code reviews
Contribute to logging, metrics, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for the services you build
Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure-by-default design
Cross-functional and process
Collaborate closely with the engineering team, product and leadership to scope, sequence, and deliver outcomes
Translate product requirements into technical plans, breaking work into milestones with measurable success criteria
Mentor engineers on backend design, API ergonomics
Why This Role?
You'll sit at the core of our product, building the systems and interfaces that make advanced AI usa
About the Company
Working at the cutting-edge of 'embodied intelligence' - the convergence of AI & edge computing - Oxford Dynamics vision is to produce intelligent machines able to sense, decide, and act in complex environments. Along this journey, the OD team is producing agentic AI technologies such as AVIS, our enterprise-level modular software platform to process complex multi-modal data using natural language. Founded in 2020 by Shefali Sharma, Dr Edward Jackson and Mike Lawton, Oxford Dynamics brings together a unique blend of battle-h...
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