{"id":1289946,"url":"https://alion.io/job/uforce-seniorstaff-software-engineer-nova-core","title":"Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Nova Core)","company":{"id":1922281,"name":"UFORCE","domain":"uforce.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/uforce-com","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":141000,"max_usd":364000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":18},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Threat Modeling","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-18T08:01:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T06:12:57Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":13,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":13},"description":"UFORCE exists to make aggression unaffordable.\nFounded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, UFORCE is a defence-technology company with operations across Europe, the United States and Asia.\nUFORCE 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.\nAbout the role\nThe 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.\nWhat you’ll do\nOwn and ship critical Nova Core backend services (e.g., common APIs, configuration service, tenant/environment lifecycle, shared domain libraries).\nDesign 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.\nEstablish production-grade operability: structured logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts; write and maintain runbooks.\nImprove reliability over time by reducing incident frequency and driving down MTTD/MTTR through instrumentation and post-incident improvements.\nImplement secure-by-default backend patterns (least privilege, secret management, audit events, policy hooks) and make them reusable across teams.\nContribute to and enforce consistent RBAC/permissions and authorization checks across services and APIs.\nAdd security-focused tests and CI/CD gates informed by threat modeling to reduce regressions.\nBuild and maintain shared backend libraries/SDKs with strong documentation and examples to accelerate adoption and reduce duplicated work.\nImprove developer experience: faster local workflows, environment parity (e.g., dockerized deps, seeded data), and rapid test feedback.\nStrengthen test harnesses (contract tests, integration tests, performance baselines) to catch cross-service breakages earlier.\nDiagnose and fix high-impact performance bottlenecks (latency hot paths, caching, concurrency, DB query efficiency) and introduce pragmatic performance budgets.\nRefactor brittle areas and pay down targeted technical debt to improve maintainability and reduce operational risk.\nCommunicate trade-offs clearly and collaborate effectively with dependent engineering and product teams.\nWhat success looks like\nCore Nova services are delivered, adopted, and operated reliably with clear SLIs/SLOs and runbooks.\nObservability is strong enough that incidents are detected quickly and resolved faster over time (improving MTTD/MTTR).\nAPI versioning and compatibility practices reduce integration churn and prevent breaking changes for dependent teams.\nSecurity and access-control foundations (authn/authz, auditability, secret handling, least privilege) are consistently applied across Nova Core services.\nShared contracts, libraries, and SDKs meaningfully reduce duplicated service work and accelerate delivery across Nova modules.\nCI/CD and release processes enable safer, more frequent deployments of core services.\nPerformance and correctness improve measurably in critical workflows (latency, resource usage, query efficiency, failure handling).\nTechnical debt is paid down in targeted areas, improving maintainability and reducing operational risk.\nRequired Qualifications\n5+ years building and operating production backend systems and services.\nStrong experience in API design, backend architecture, and evolving contracts safely over time.\nSolid data modeling and persistence experience (SQL and/or NoSQL), including migrations and schema evolution.\nDemonstrated operational ownership: observability, on-call readiness, incident response, and production debugging.\nSecurity-first backend engineering experience, including authn/authz patterns and audit/event design.\nStrong testing discipline (unit/integration/contract testing) and ability to build reliable systems under real-world constraints.\nClear communication and cross-team collaboration skills; comfortable aligning stakeholders on architecture decisions.\nNice to have\nExperience building platform foundations for multi-service environments (shared libraries/SDKs, service templates, internal platforms).\nExperience with multi-tenant systems, tenant lifecycle management, and environment provisioning patterns.\nExperience with distributed systems reliability patterns (idempotency, retries, transactional workflows, consistency trade-offs).\nExperience with performance engineering (profiling, load testing, latency budgets) and cost-aware backend optimization.\nExperience in defence tech / C2/C4ISR / tactical systems, constrained deployments, or regulated/on-prem environments.\nThe nature of combat has changed.\nTomorrow’s battlefield success depends on autonomy, speed, and adaptability.\nAnd UFORCE is ready.\nAre You?","description_format":"text","description_chars":5405,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cybersecurity","Military","Penetration Testing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T07:41:39Z"}],"liveness":{"score":61,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.679,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":12,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:11","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/uforce-seniorstaff-software-engineer-nova-core","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/uforce-seniorstaff-software-engineer-nova-core.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T11:00:23Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2280,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2720,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}