Senior Software Developer in Biggin Hill

Are you ready to make your mark in the world of Formula 1? At Formula 1, we are passionate about delivering the world’s greatest sports and entertainment spectacle leaving a positive legacy wherever we race. Innovation has always been at the heart of what we do ever since our first Grand Prix in 1950. Now, 75 years on, the sport remains a pioneer, developing technologies that have made a significant impact on society beyond the track.

We are looking for a Senior Software Developer to Electronics team at Formula 1's Media & Technology Centre in Biggin Hill. Reporting into our Lead Software Architect and Team Manager, you'll join a team of Software Developers working on mission critical applications to support the F1 championship and support series.

Main Duties and Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the support, maintenance, and enhancement of mission‑critical applications used for Timing and Production across the F1 Championship and associated series.
• Lead or significantly contribute to the design and development of new software products, working closely with a small, focused engineering team.
• Maintain a broad understanding of the full software ecosystem and provide cross‑functional support for bug fixing, development, testing, and operational readiness.
• Own the design and delivery of specific system components or domains, ensuring robustness, performance, and maintainability.
• Champion engineering excellence by driving modernisation, reducing technical debt, and improving architecture through iterative, low‑risk evolution.
• Contribute to improving development tooling, build pipelines, and CI/CD processes to enhance delivery speed, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Produce high‑quality, well‑structured code with appropriate documentation, unit testing, and adherence to coding standards.
• Mentor and support junior and mid‑level developers, encouraging best practices and fostering technical growth within the team.
• Develop a broad T‑shaped skill set across the F1 software environment while maintaining deeper specialisation in agreed‑upon domains.
• Provide onsite technical support at Biggin Hill and Trackside for selected race weekends as part of a rota.
• Participate in and help lead group engineering activities, including design reviews, requirement refinement, system architecture discussions, sprint ceremonies, and technical demonstrations.
• Work within one of the three Domain teams, each led by a Team Lead, collaborating closely across the group with the expectation of rotating between Domain teams over time.
• Uphold secure‑by‑design and secure coding practices (e.g., least privilege, secrets management, dependency and vulnerability management, input validation, and threat‑aware reviews).
• Protect data and systems in day‑to‑day engineering (e.g., access control hygiene, careful handling of production data, and secure use of tooling, environments, and artefacts).
• Report and assist with the remediation of security issues (e.g., vulnerabilities, suspicious activity, or incidents) in coordination with the appropriate teams.
• Operate safely and responsibly in line with company health and safety requirements, particularly during onsite and trackside work.

What Are We Looking For?

Experience:

• 5+ years’ experience in software development; .NET is our primary stack, but strong Java/JVM engineers can transition easily and are encouraged to apply.
• Strong experience designing, developing, and supporting distributed systems, including event‑driven architectures built around message buses or event streams (e.g., Kafka, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS).
• Solid understanding of concurrency, parallelism, and performance considerations in distributed environments.
• Proficient with MongoDB in production (schema design, query optimisation, aggregation).
• Some desirable experience that you may bring to the role: Experience with consuming and processing high frequency data in a real-time / near real-time environment.
• 2+ years working knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server (Currently 2019).
• Ability to evaluate and responsibly adopt AI/LLM‑powered tooling to improve engineering efficiency and code quality.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Solid understanding of object‑oriented design principles and common architectural patterns (e.g., MVVM, DI, CQRS).
• Strong grasp of asynchronous programming and concurrency models, including multi‑threading and task‑based workflows (e.g., TPL).
• Proficient in Pub/Sub and event‑driven patterns and their implementation in modern software environments.
• Fluent in LINQ and functional programming concepts as used within C# or equivalent languages.
• Microservice architectures, service boundaries, and containerisation technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiar with application metrics, monitoring, and observability practices using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or CloudWatch.
• Understanding of cloud‑native concepts such as managed services, container orchestration, and distributed deployment patterns across AWS/Azure/GCP.

Personal Qualities:

• Bring a positive, collaborative attitude and build strong working relationships across diverse teams and disciplines.
• Remain calm, clear‑headed, and solutions‑focused in time‑critical or high‑pressure situations.
• Are adaptable and comfortable stepping into unfamiliar problem spaces.
• Act with integrity, ownership, and accountability.
• Are open to feedback and receptive to different viewpoints.
• Demonstrate a continuous improvement mindset, both in your own development and in your contribution to the team’s culture and ways of working.

Qualifications:

• Not essential to be successful in the role but you may also have the following qualifications: Hons Degree in Computer Science (or related technical discipline) or equivalent commercial experience.

Career Progression - Where You Can Go Next:

In this role, your next career move could include progressing into Principal Software Developer or Principal Solutions Architect.

Why join the force behind the sport?

Joining F1 means becoming part of a team that values innovation, collaboration and personal growth. We offer a dynamic work environment where ideas are heard, and employee contributions truly make an impact. We seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people to play their role in accelerating the future of the sport.

As a member of the F1 team, you will be able to access our amazing benefits:

• Private Healthcare scheme
• Dental Care
• 4 x Grand Prix Paddock passes per season
• Enhanced maternity/paternity leave and other family planning policies
• A free staff shuttle service running to and from surrounding trains stations near to Biggin Hill
• Free healthy snacks in our offices
• Subsidised canteen in Biggin Hill, serving breakfast and lunch
• 25 days annual leave and 8 Bank Holiday days, plus a Christmas period closure
• Opportunities to develop and request training for your role via our in-house Learning and Development team
• Discount on F1 merchandise
• Discount at F1’s experiences including F1 Arcade and F1 Drive
• Perkbox benefit portal and more

Division: Technical