Staff Software Engineer

About Adarga

Adarga builds AI systems for customers working in Defence, Security and Resilience. With a core focus on our multimodal data fusion platform, we combine the value of humans and agents to transform information overload into decision advantage. Our team is a hybrid of domain specialists and technologists. We believe this layering of experience is key to building cutting‑edge AI that is operationally relevant. With foundations set in NLP, computational linguistics and graph technology, we now draw on the latest ideas in agentic AI and knowledge representation, as we set our sights firmly on defining and building the next era of sovereign AI capability. To work at Adarga you have to care deeply about the mission. We exist to support those with the ultimate task: upholding the liberties and values that define our society. We want people who are comfortable with uncertainty, who want to own decisions, who want to drive a vision.

About The Role

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will partner with our Chief Architect as a technical peer, own major parts of the platform end‑to‑end, and help drive the technical vision for what Adarga builds next. You are accountable for keeping us at the frontier of what is technically possible. You ship a lot, and you help everyone around you ship more. You communicate clearly across the business, with engineering, product, commercial, security, and mission stakeholders, translating technical reality into decisions the company can act on. You treat AI‑assisted development as a core engineering practice rather than a side experiment, integrating it into how we design, write, review, test, and operate software.

What You Will Do

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for a major component of our data platform, accountable to the Chief Architect for its long‑term coherence, performance, and operability.
• Lead multi‑team technical initiatives end to end: identify the problem, scope the work, write the design, align stakeholders, and stay engaged through delivery and operation.
• Set engineering standards across the company.
• Define how we build, test, deploy, and operate distributed systems that handle multimodal data and agentic workloads.
• Drive adoption through influence and worked examples.
• Make and document the hard trade‑offs: build versus buy, abstraction versus speed, generality versus fit for a specific mission.
• Shape our deployment story across managed cloud, customer cloud, on‑premises, edge, and air‑gapped contexts.
• Set the technical direction for our agent framework, integrating existing architectures and emerging alternatives.
• Lead how Adarga uses AI‑assisted development across the engineering organisation.
• Define the patterns, evaluate the tooling, and raise the floor of what every engineer can ship per week.
• Raise the bar of engineers around you. Mentor others. Run design reviews. Unblock teams that are stuck.
• Partner with Security, Product, and Mission stakeholders to ensure our architecture meets the access control, data protection, integrity, and accreditation demands of the environments we operate in.
• Represent Adarga engineering externally where useful: in customer technical conversations, in supplier and partner discussions, and in the community.

What We Are Looking For

• You have owned the architecture of a non‑trivial production system that has survived multiple years of change, multiple generations of contributors, and real operational load.
• You can talk specifically about what you got right, what you got wrong, and what you would do differently.
• You have led at least one multi‑team technical initiative from ambiguity to production.
• You can describe how you framed the problem, where you pushed back on the original brief, and how you drove alignment without formal authority.
• You have set technical standards that outlived your tenure somewhere.
• Coding standards, design review processes, deployment patterns, architectural principles, something concrete that other people kept using after you stopped pushing for it.
• You are a working engineer, not a retired one. You still write production code.
• You can be trusted with a hard component when the team needs it.
• Strong system design judgement, evidenced by the ability to reason about performance, reliability, scalability, cost, and operability together rather than in isolation, and to articulate the trade‑offs in writing.
• Production proficiency in Python.
• Deep experience designing systems that handle multiple data modalities, including the storage, indexing, and serving patterns that this implies.
• Hands‑on experience with container orchestration and with deploying the same software cleanly across heterogeneous infrastructure, including constrained, disconnected, or air‑gapped environments.
• Recent, hands‑on experience building production systems with agent frameworks.
• Expertise in AI‑assisted development workflows using tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor.
• Strong API and cloud infrastructure fundamentals.
• Writes clearly. Design docs, decision records, post‑mortems, technical strategy. If you cannot write it down, you do not yet own it.
• Communicates well with non‑engineers: product, commercial, security, and end users.
• Translates technical reality into terms that allow business decisions to be made.

Eligibility

You must be eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC). This typically requires UK nationality, dual nationality or a minimum of five years continuous UK residency. Some projects may require higher clearance, which Adarga will sponsor.

Hiring Process

• Initial conversation with the hiring manager.
• Technical deep‑dive with the Chief Architect or another Staff Engineer, covering a system you have owned end to end.
• In‑person systems design and technical leadership exercise.
• Conversation with a cross‑functional partner (Product, Security, or Mission) to test how you operate outside engineering.
• Offer.