Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Onboard Services)

UFORCE, United Kingdom - London

The role

The Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Onboard Services) will design, build, and operate the software services that run on UFORCE’s uncrewed vehicles — spanning video streaming, telemetry, autonomy integration, vehicle control, health monitoring, navigation, and device integrations.

You will turn independently evolved services into one secure, testable, and maintainable onboard platform. This is a hands-on software engineering role focused on production Python services, service architecture, messaging, and reliable operation on constrained Linux hardware, including Raspberry Pi, x86, and NVIDIA Jetson.

What you will do

What you’ll do

Define and evolve a unified onboard service architecture: service boundaries, messaging, configuration, startup ordering, readiness, watchdogs, and graceful degradation when dependencies or devices are unavailable.
Build and migrate production services to shared patterns, using reusable libraries and a reference service template covering project structure, packaging, logging, health reporting, and lifecycle management.
Standardise local service communication around NATS, with clear rules for integrating MAVLink, ZMQ IPC, and HTTP where appropriate.
Design stable, versioned vehicle-to-backend contracts for telemetry, commands and acknowledgements, video metadata and control, configuration, health, and logs.
Engineer for unreliable connectivity: buffering and store-and-forward, idempotent commands, explicit acknowledgements and timeouts, reconnection, back-off, and safe behaviour when the backend is unreachable.
Implement secure-by-default services: least-privilege identities and messaging permissions, mutually authenticated and encrypted backend links, secure credential provisioning and rotation, sandboxed runtimes, and audit events for safety-critical commands.
Strengthen automated testing across unit, contract, integration, simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop tests, with CI gates that catch regressions before release.
Build safer release workflows with signed packages, dependency scanning, bench smoke and soak tests, staged fleet rollouts, and reliable rollback.
Profile services and enforce practical CPU, memory, and latency budgets on target hardware.
Improve field diagnostics through structured logs, metrics, standardised health reporting, post-mission log capture, and actionable runbooks.
Document architectural decisions and service interfaces, communicate trade-offs clearly, and use AI coding tools to accelerate delivery without compromising quality.

What success looks like

Actively developed onboard services converge on a shared architecture, supported Python runtime, messaging model, and service template.
Engineers can take a new service from an empty repository to running on a bench vehicle in a day or less, with less duplicated infrastructure code.
Vehicle-to-backend contracts remain compatible as cloud and vehicle software evolve at different speeds, preventing integration failures in the field.
Authentication, least privilege, secret handling, runtime hardening, and supply-chain checks are consistently applied across the onboard stack.
Automated tests and bench validation catch defects before deployment, reducing issues discovered in the field.
Releases move predictably from bench validation to pilot vehicles and the wider fleet, with clear readiness gates and rollback procedures.
Services stay within resource budgets and remain diagnosable under hardware constraints and degraded connectivity.
Architecture documentation and runbooks help engineering, QA, and field teams integrate changes and resolve failures faster.

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Onboard Services)

The role

Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Onboard Services)

The role

What you will do

What you’ll do

What success looks like

What you need

About UFORCE

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Interview questions

UFORCE