Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead in Harwell

Metrea is a defense company dedicated to translating commercial innovation into solutions for the hardest problems in national security. With deep mission expertise, Metrea focuses on delivering effects-as-a-service across Aerospace, Electromagnetic & Cyber, Digital & Synthetic domains via its capability groups.

The Digital and Synthetic Capability Unit (D&S) is committed to providing mission-driven information solutions that seamlessly bridge the digital and physical realms. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies and advanced platforms, we empower operational readiness and elevate situational awareness across diverse domains—including air, maritime, and space.

We are looking for a highly experienced staff software engineer to provide technical leadership for our Mission System product as part of a Product-led cross-functional team. Candidates should have detailed knowledge and experience of best practice across the software development lifecycle, including valued input to design, coding, testing and deployment; they can be relied upon to independently lead the design and implementation of complex features and own the delivery of large projects, or complex changes to existing systems or products.

Metrea is a people-first organisation and candidates should have strong communication skills and a desire to proactively elevate their team through continuous knowledge sharing, collaboration, feedback, and mentorship.

Role and Responsibilities

• Visualise, design, and develop innovative software collaboratively as we continue to experience growth in the usage and visibility of our products;
• Proactively lead discussion and decision-making around architecture, API & database design, and technical approach;
• Create future-proof and scalable software applications and solutions that are unit tested, code reviewed, well documented and autonomously checked through continuous integration and deployment pipelines;
• Review teammates work and analyse existing solutions to identify and implement improvements, ensuring we deliver efficient, elegant and robust software of the highest quality;
• Mentor and coach junior team members to ensure they are supported and able to thrive within their role;
• Collaborate with the Product Manager and others both within the team and across the business to shape and refine the product’s backlog, ensuring that the delivered solution is continually solving our customer’s problems.

Skills and Experience

Our ideal candidate would be someone with:

• Minimum 4+ years’ demonstrable experience of full stack software development;
• Enthusiasm for team delivery in an Agile environment;
• Great interpersonal skills, able to confidently communicate issues to both technical and non-technical team members;
• Familiarity with service-oriented and message driven architectures;
• Shift-left approach to testing and willingness to participate throughout the whole lifecycle of user stories;
• Experience working with CI/CD Pipelines for automated analysis, build, test and deployment of software products;
• Strong organisational skills, proactive approach to task admin and documentation;
• Experience of championing best practices in software development.

In addition to the above, any of the following would be a bonus:

• Experience working on geospatial visualisation products and/or geospatial data storage;
• Familiarity with the aviation or defence industries;
• Familiarity with the Azure DevOps platform;
• Experience of web development with React framework and/or CesiumJS;
• Experience with C#, ASP.NET Core, Postgres.

Our Culture

Metrea’s single core value ‘rooted in humility’ is supported by four key attributes: Systematic; Discerning; Over-delivering. These combined form our Teammate Firmware, our culture. These attributes are explored during the hiring process, when we grow our teams, and to continually support the growth of our culture. We are a hyper-collaborative, dynamically hierarchical organisation united by a passion for what we do, how we do it, who we do it with, and who we do it for.

Position Type and Expected Hours of Work

This is a full-time position, 37.5 hours per week. Hours and work shifts may change in accordance with department and business needs. Exempt Employees must have the ability to be on-call and available, as business needs require. Non-Exempt employees may be required to work over 37.5 hours per week with approval from the department manager.