Staff Engineer; Tech Lead), Full-Stack

Who we are

4C Strategies builds organisational readiness and military training management software for clients in over 70 countries. Our flagship product, Exonaut®, is used by NATO and allied forces to plan, run and evaluate exercises in real time. Our consultants and engineers work alongside armed forces across the UK, Europe, North America and beyond to deliver training and exercise management solutions.

Much of this hasn’t been designed yet — and that’s the point. We’re connecting Exonaut® to a fast-growing landscape of systems — a data lakehouse, customer ERP platforms, optimisation engines and partner platforms — on one of the most significant training transformation programmes in UK defence, and many of the hard problems are still open. We want a Staff Engineer to act as technical lead for the team: a full-stack engineer whose centre of gravity is backend and integration work, who is energised by that ambiguity and can take a vaguely-defined need, shape it with the team, and build it across the stack.

You’ll lead through influence rather than formal authority, partnering closely with our Engineering Managers and Product Managers.

You’ll own and evolve parts of the Exonaut® platform itself, not just wire systems together — product engineering at the seams of several moving parts, from the services and APIs underneath to the interfaces people use. There’s a clear programme direction and a strong team around you; within that, scope will shift and you’ll have the autonomy to make the calls that matter.

This is a Staff role with real ownership. You’ll lead substantial pieces of work end-to-end — designing, choosing the right patterns, and seeing them through to production — and steward the technical direction across the team: the architecture, the standards, the tools, and how we test and observe what we build. You’ll still spend meaningful time hands‑on in the code, with the balance gradually tilting toward leadership — your impact growing through the design sessions you lead, the engineers you mentor, and the architecture you shape across data, integrations and APIs.

Day to day you’ll collaborate with other engineers, project managers and designers on the programme, with senior stakeholders on the customer side, and with peers across the wider 4C engineering organisation — where the IC track is treated as a first‑class career path alongside management.

• Hold the technical vision for our work on the programme, in close partnership with Engineering Management, Product and Delivery — and stay close enough to the code to lead by example.
• Figure out and build how Exonaut talks to everything around it — a data lakehouse, customer ERP systems, optimisation engines and partner platforms — often from a rough idea rather than a finished spec, reading and writing data reliably with maintainability, observability and security designed in from the start.
• Build full‑stack features on the Exonaut® platform — the backend services and APIs, and the user‑facing interfaces on top of them — so the systems you connect are matched by interfaces people can actually use.
• Work across a modern stack — Java and SQL on the backend, Angular on the front‑end, plus pipeline and data tooling — making real architecture calls rather than inheriting someone else’s, so judgement and pragmatism matter more than experience with any one tool. Introduce event‑driven and change‑data‑capture (CDC) patterns where they keep data flowing in near‑real‑time.
• Lead design sessions and steward the architecture across data, integrations and APIs — driving simplicity and sustainability so the calls we make today still serve the programme years from now.
• Help raise our engineering standards around code quality, automated testing, CI/CD and observability — building the pipelines and test automation that let us ship changes safely and often, with quality and operability treated as first‑class engineering concerns, not an afterthought.
• Mentor and coach engineers across the team — not just juniors — mentoring Senior Engineers toward Staff‑level scope, and help grow our full‑stack and integration engineering practice inside 4C.
• Repres…