Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer – Scala, Distributed Systems

• 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, 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.