About the role

We’re growing our Gloucester team and have several opportunities for Lead Software Engineers to work across our Defence, Cyber and Intelligence programmes.

You’ll help create and improve secure software systems and applications that safeguard digital infrastructure across the UK. Whether you bring deep expertise in a single domain or thrive by orchestrating across multiple stages of the development cycle, both paths are welcomed and valued.

This is a lead software engineer role, so we’re looking for a solid foundation in engineering practice, sound technical judgment, and the drive to take ownership of complex initiatives and guide the team through its delivery. You should be comfortable architecting end to end solutions, setting technical direction, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and mentorship. 
The role

As Lead Engineer you’ll partner with product owners, customers, and cross functional teams to translate complex business and technical needs into robust, scalable solutions.

You’ll set the technical vision, drive architectural decisions, and lead the delivery cycle while ensuring that every team member meets the same high standards for quality, security, and maintainability.

Day to day responsibilities include:

• Defining long term technical strategy and guiding system design, making the critical decisions that shape the product’s trajectory.
• Acting as the technical liaison between engineering, product, operations, and external customers, ensuring clear expectations, realistic timelines, and mutual alignment.
• Overseeing the design, build, test, debug, and documentation of high reliability, deployment ready code, while ensuring its performance, scalability, and maintainability.
• Coaching junior and mid level engineers, sharing knowledge, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

Security clearance

This role requires you to be able to obtain and maintain UK Developed Vetting (DV) security clearance.

You don’t need to hold DV clearance when you apply. If you don’t currently have it, we’ll support you through the application process.

Learning and development

You’ll have access to internal training and development, education-assistance programmes and reimbursement for relevant professional memberships.

We’ll help you build familiarity with our projects and technologies while giving you opportunities to deepen your existing strengths.

Required skills, qualifications and experience

• Proven delivery of complex, high visibility initiatives in a professional engineering environment, with a track record of owning the end to end cycle.
• Deep expertise in at least one modern language (Java, Python, C++, Go, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript) and a strong grasp of how that language scales in production.
• Hands on knowledge of Linux, Git, CI/CD, and automated testing that you can translate into best practice pipelines for the team.
• You will weight technical trade-offs, clearly articulate the rationale, and communicate decisions to product, operations, and other stakeholders
• You will foster a collaborative mindset, demonstrate a commitment to continuous learning, and work to raise the entire team’s skill level.
• We want to hear about how you’ve delivered high impact software, guided architectural decisions, and championed quality across a project.

Desired skills

Our projects cover a broad range of technologies, including:

• Cloud platforms, particularly AWS.
• Automated GitLab delivery pipelines and infrastructure as code.
• Microservices, serverless architectures and cloud migration.
• Relational and NoSQL databases, data integration and search technologies.
• Web and application frameworks such as React, Express and Next.js.
• Tools including Gitlab, NiFi, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Jira and Confluence.
• AI coding assistants, agentic coding and ML tooling.

While experience in certain domains is highly valuable, this role is not defined by an exhaustive skill checklist, and we do not expect a single individual to be an expert across every technology area.

We support continuous learning through targeted training, mentorship, and hands on opportunities to acquire new, project specific tools—including the practical application of AI techniques to our software development processes.