OB Collective
Senior Software Engineer
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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.
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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
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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.
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