Senior Backend Engineer; Palantir Foundry

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 the entire team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day.

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

You’ll sit at the core of our product, building the systems that make advanced AI usable in the real world. If you enjoy owning backend services end to end, care deeply about reliability and API quality, and want to work hands‑on with Palantir Foundry in a high‑impact environment, this role offers both autonomy and real impact.

• 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 (Postgre
  
  SQL) 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.

• Work with Palantir Foundry to build and maintain data pipelines, ontologies, and integrations that connect backend services to Foundry‑based analytics and workflows.
• Leverage Foundry's APIs and tooling to support data modelling, transformation, and secure data exchange across the platform.

• 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/Open Search) for the services you build.
• Support compliance readiness (ISO 27001, GDPR) through secure‑by‑default design.

• 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 and API ergonomics.

• Ship services via Docker containers with clean, minimal builds.
• Contribute to IaC (Terraform/Cloud Formation) and CI/CD pipelines (Git Hub Actions/Argo CD) alongside the Dev Ops team.
• Support cloud operations with sensible defaults, cost awareness, and environment promotion across dev/staging/prod.

• SC Clearance or the ability to obtain SC (and later DV).
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development in…