Senior Software Engineer; Digital Engineering & Semantic Data)

Job Description

Salary Range:

Senior Engineer £45000 - £60000

Leonardo UK operates a grade-based salary framework with broad bands. The salary range shown reflects the approved grade band for this role, or a narrower hiring range published within that band, and is benchmarked against the external market. Exceptions above the standard range are managed through governance controls to protect internal equity.

Are you an experienced software engineer who enjoys tackling complex technical problems? Do you thrive in collaborative environments and want to contribute to the development of new capabilities that have a real impact across a wider business?

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the GCAP Enablers team and help develop innovative digital engineering capabilities that support the next generation of aerospace programmes. Working as part of a collaborative, multidisciplinary team, you will contribute to the design and development of software solutions that improve how engineering information is created, connected, and used across the product lifecycle.

You will work alongside software engineers, systems engineers, data specialists, and domain experts to solve complex challenges, while having opportunities to learn and apply modern technologies and approaches. This role is ideal for a software craftsman who is motivated by the challenge of building high-abstraction digital environments and is eager to apply their skills to a cutting-edge technical project.

You will help build the digital fabric that connects our distributed engineering landscape. By implementing a graph-based "Digital Thread," you will enable the seamless flow of enriched information across partners and teams, ensuring that our engineering ecosystem is resilient, scalable, and logically consistent.

• Implementing the Digital Thread: Developing software that transforms fragmented data from disparate sources into a unified, ontology-driven Knowledge Graph.
• Enabling Composable Engineering: Building a digital environment where relationships between engineering artefacts are first-class citizens, allowing for flexible and concurrent views of the system.
• Solving Distributed Interoperability: Creating mechanisms that allow tenuously connected environments and partners to contribute to a shared semantic representation without requiring rigid, point-to-point tool integration.
• Driving Strategic Adoption: Contributing to the overall strategy for the wider adoption of Knowledge Graphs and semantic technologies across the business to solve complex data challenges.
• Ensuring Digital Rigour: Implementing the configuration control and concurrency models that ensure the Digital Thread remains a reliable, authoritative source of truth at scale.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be a key implementer of our digital engineering construct. You will move beyond "glue code" to build a high-abstraction layer based on semantic web principles.

• Develop and maintain the software implementation of the Digital Thread using the Semantic Web stack (e.g., RDF, OWL, SPARQL).
• Build and optimise the graph databases and triple stores that house the engineering relationships and enrichments.
• Implement the logic that allows for the "enrichment" of data as it moves through the thread, adding semantic value and context.

• Develop tool adapters that map local data schemas to a global ontology, ensuring that tool-specific data is ingested into the graph without losing semantic meaning.
• Focus on "mapping to the model" rather than "mapping to the tool," preventing the proliferation of fragile, point-to-point integrations.

• Architect and implement the versioning and configuration control mechanisms for the Digital Thread graph, ensuring that changes are traceable and concurrent access is managed.
• Develop software patterns that allow the graph to remain performant and consistent across a large, distributed programme.

• Work closely with the Principal Systems Engineer to translate formal ontologies into…