At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design and delivery of data pipelines in a hands-on engineering role.
- Company: Join OB Collective, a leader in data integrity for government and law enforcement.
- Benefits: Competitive rate of £700/day, remote-first work, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Dynamic team environment with opportunities to mentor and shape engineering standards.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on trustworthy data systems while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: Strong Scala skills, distributed systems experience, and current NPPV3 clearance required.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 £ per year.
Location: UK, remote-first with occasional onsite. UK-based, UK data handling only.
Engagement: Contract, outside IR35. Rate: circa £700/day depending on experience.
Clearance: Current, portable NPPV3 is essential (SC alongside is a strong plus). We can only consider people who already hold in-date, transferable clearance.
About the work: OB Collective build data integrity, provenance and assurance infrastructure for government and law-enforcement data environments – the layer that makes complex, multi-source data pipelines trustworthy, traceable and defensible. We have a growing pipeline of engagements in this space and are expanding our bench of senior, cleared engineers to draw on. This is a hands-on, lead engineering role: you shape the technical approach, set the standard for a small delivery team, stay close to the code, and work directly with operational users and partner engineers to ground the build in how systems are actually used.
What you'll do:
- Own the technical design and delivery of a data-pipeline/provenance engagement
- Build ingestion, transformation and lineage across distributed systems, streaming and batch
- Define integration interfaces with partner's existing pipeline and keep the join clean
- Engage operational users directly to understand real workflows and constraints
- Set engineering standards, review, and mentor a small team
Essential:
- Current, portable NPPV3 clearance
- Strong Scala/JVM engineering, with sound typed / functional design instincts
- Distributed systems experience — building and reasoning about concurrent, fault-tolerant services
- Experience with data pipelines — ingestion, transformation, lineage, streaming and batch
- Solid API and structured-data fluency: REST/gRPC, JSON/Avro/Protobuf
- Sound CI/CD and testing discipline — correctness matters in high-assurance work
- Self-directing: able to take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a robust solution without close supervision
- Comfortable engaging operational users and partner engineers, not just heads-down build
- UK-based, able to handle data within the UK only
Desirable:
- SC clearance alongside NPPV3
- Functional / typed Scala — Cats, Cats Effect, FS2, http4s, Circe — a strong plus
- Streaming / big-data frameworks (Kafka, Spark, Flink) for integrating with partner pipelines
- Government, policing or law-enforcement data experience
- Data lineage, provenance, audit or integrity/verification tooling
- Secure-by-design development and comfort handling sensitive/classified data (UK GDPR / DPA awareness)
- Containerisation/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes); on-prem, air-gapped or restricted environments as well as cloud
To apply, please submit your CV highlighting relevant skills and experience, along with your current clearance status.
Senior Software Engineer employer: OB Collective
At OB Collective, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that values innovation and integrity in the realm of data engineering. Our remote-first work culture fosters flexibility and collaboration, allowing you to engage with a diverse team while contributing to meaningful projects that support government and law enforcement. With opportunities for professional growth and a commitment to high standards, you'll find a rewarding environment where your expertise in Scala and distributed systems can truly shine.
