Senior Full-Stack Engineer; Backend specialism

Overview

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 are 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:

• 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

Frontend contributions

• Contribute to frontend features using React/Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Type Script 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/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

Secur…