OB Collective
Senior System Engineer
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Senior Systems Software Engineer – Verification & Security
OB Collective develops independent verification technology for organisations operating in government, regulated, and high-assurance environments. Our work is concerned with establishing reliable evidence about information and automated actions before organisations rely on them.
We’re building a senior technical team for a six-twelve month engagement on a UK public-sector R&D programme focused on the cybersecurity and operational assurance of AI agents. We’re looking for a Senior Systems Software Engineer – Verification & Security to develop the core verification mechanisms behind the programme.
As AI agents gain access to organisational data, credentials, tools, APIs, and enterprise systems, organisations need stronger ways to establish whether required conditions were satisfied around consequential actions. The programme will extend an existing software capability to provide independently verifiable evidence, identify uncertainty, and test how verification behaves under incomplete information, failure, and adversarial conditions.
There is an existing technical capability and a defined research direction. The engineering challenge is to extend that capability while ensuring that incomplete, stale, inconsistent, or failed evidence cannot silently be represented as successful verification.
You will work closely with the Principal Technical Lead to build and refine the underlying software, with substantial responsibility for correctness, evidence integrity, deterministic behaviour, reproducibility, and failure handling.
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This is a hands-on engineering position requiring someone who can build reliable software, reason carefully about difficult boundary conditions, diagnose unexpected behaviour, and establish confidence through rigorous testing.
Strong Rust experience is preferred, but candidates with excellent security-sensitive systems or backend engineering experience in Go, C++, Java, or comparable languages will also be considered.
The role is UK-based, outside IR35, full-time, and primarily remote, with occasional travel for workshops and technical activity.
What you’ll do
- Develop and extend the existing verification software.
- Build structured evidence records associated with specific automated actions.
- Implement reliable evidence processing, canonicalisation, and integrity mechanisms.
- Develop deterministic and versioned verification functionality.
- Ensure failed, degraded, and insufficient evidence is represented explicitly rather than treated as successful verification.
- Implement checks around evidence freshness, timing, action association, and other critical conditions.
- Handle incomplete observation, delegated access, and difficult system-boundary conditions.
- Build reproducible replay and re-verification capabilities.
- Develop clear machine-readable outcomes, failure information, and reason codes.
- Create automated tests covering unusual inputs, degraded conditions, and adversarial behaviour.
- Use seeded failures, property-based testing, or comparable techniques to establish correctness.
- Investigate implementation, resilience, and performance issues identified through evaluation.
- Contribute to code review, technical security work, documentation, and release stabilisation.
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What we’re looking for
- Strong hands-on backend, systems, or infrastructure software engineering experience.
- Experience developing software where correctness, integrity, and failure behaviour are critical.
- Strong practical capability in Rust or a comparable systems/backend language.
- Experience with reliable software design, automated testing, and debugging complex behaviour.
- Understanding of structured data, APIs, services, or reusable software libraries.
- Understanding of data integrity and practical cryptographic mechanisms such as hashing and signing.
- Ability to reason carefully about incomplete inputs, state, timing, and failure.
- Experience maintaining or extending established production codebases.
- Ability to explain what software can and cannot establish from available evidence.
- Confidence working collaboratively on architecture, implementation, and technical reviews.
Preferred experience
- Production Rust engineering.
- Applied cryptography.
- Secure logging, provenance, or tamper-evident records.
- Distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
- Deterministic replay, event sourcing, or verification systems.
- Property-based testing or formal verification techniques.
- IAM, policy evaluation, or security-control integration.
- Fault injection, resilience engineering, or performance testing.
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