Senior Software Engineer II

Thought Machine

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. At Thought Machine, our Senior Software Engineers specialised in Infrastructure play a crucial role in deploying and maintaining our cutting-edge software, developing tools and integrations with third-party infrastructure components used in our customers’ environments. Our team's mission is to abstract away multi-cloud complexity and reduce cognitive load for other developers. We treat our platform infrastructure which spans, orchestration, observability, and data. As a first-class product, enabling our internal teams and global clients to operate securely and reliably at massive scale. Duties * Scale the Core Platform: Evolve, scale, and optimise the cloud-agnostic platform infrastructure powering Vault globally. * Simplify Orchestration: Build intuitive control planes and automation to further abstract away infrastructure complexity, significantly easing the cognitive load for Thought Machine engineers and bank SREs. * Design for Resiliency: Engineer robust, fault-tolerant architectures and Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Planning (DR/BCP) systems. * Advance Observability: Enhance our comprehensive observability suites that are shared across the entire Thought Machine product ecosystem, providing clients with deep, out-of-the-box monitoring and insights * Optimise Data & Streaming: Scale and optimise core databases and event-streaming platforms to achieve maximum performance and scalability at the lowest cost Essential * Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a similar technical field. * 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling infrastructure platforms (not just maintaining them). * Strong proficiency in building production-ready platform tooling using Python or Golang. * Deep understanding of container and orchestration internals (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). * Hands-on experience extending and integrating open-source tools like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana. * Proven ability to package and scale developer-facing infrastructure utilities with a focus on improving system reliability. Desirable * Experience building cloud-agnostic solutions running across AWS, Azure, and GCP. * Technical depth in databases or event-streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, DuckDB). * A deep interest in the internals of infrastructure tools, with a track record of troubleshooting, extending, or optimizing them within a professional environment. Benefits * Highly competitive salary and commission * Pension plan (match up to 5%) * Life insurance (3x annual salary) * Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) * Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) * 25 days holiday and bank holidays * Flexible working hours * Cycle-to-work scheme * Electric car scheme * Season ticket loan * Access to outstanding learning materials and courses * Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine * All the latest tech you need * Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals * Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks * A talented and experienced team as your colleagues * An environment where we encourage learning and progress * Two charity days a year * Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.

Thought Machine

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. As a Senior Software Engineer I at Thought Machine, you will own and deliver highly complex, end-to-end engineering work items. You will look beyond immediate coding tasks to consider long-term system architecture, product strategy, and client outcomes. In this role, you will act as a technical anchor for your team, solving ambiguous problems, guiding less experienced engineers, and actively shaping our technical and product roadmaps. This is a role for an engineer who values clean, maintainable systems, embraces an egoless approach to collaboration, and is driven to deliver robust solutions to production. WHAT YOU’LL DO Technical Leadership * Design & Build: Design and build highly reliable, secure, and scalable software solutions for complex problems. * Architecture & Standards: Contribute to team guidelines ensuring our services meet top-tier security, performance, cost, and reliability standards. * Code Quality & Peer Review: Set a high bar for code quality by providing constructive, detailed feedback on design documents and pull requests. * Operational Excellence: Investigate issues across multiple services in production, drive learning from operational incidents, and feed improvements back into our prioritisation process. * Hiring: Actively participate in our growth by leading technical interviews. Product & Delivery * End-to-End Ownership: Own work items from initial concept to production, creating structured delivery plans, managing dependencies along the way and owning delivery of these work items. * Product Vision: Partner with Product Managers to prioritize features, translate client requirements into technical specifications, and ensure solutions align with our overarching product vision. * Incident Management: Confidently own the resolution of incidents, coordinating mitigation, fixes, and post-mortem artifacts. Collaboration & Mentorship * Team Growth: Mentor and support less experienced engineers, helping them level up technically and adapt to Thought Machine’s engineering philosophy. * Stakeholder Management: Translate highly technical problems and architectural decisions into clear concepts for non-technical stakeholders. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR * Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in modern backend languages (ideally Go or Python) and experience building distributed, cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, gRPC, PostgreSQL). * Problem Solving: A proven track record of breaking down ambiguous, and complex problems into clear, deliverable milestones. * Production Operations: Experience supporting high-throughput systems in production environments and diagnosing complex issues across distributed systems. * Egoless Collaboration: A highly collaborative, feedback-receptive mindset focused on finding the best outcomes for our clients and business rather than defending personal preferences. * Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build consensus and document technical designs clearly. Benefits * Highly competitive salary * Pension plan (match up to 5%) * Life insurance - three times annual salary * Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid) * Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time) * 25 days holiday and bank holidays * Flexible working hours * Cycle-to-work scheme * Electric car scheme * Season ticket loan * Access to outstanding learning materials and courses * Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine * All the latest tech you need * Start the day properly with fresh fruit and cereals * Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks * A talented and experienced team as your colleagues * An environment where we encourage learning and progress * Two charity days a year * Weekly food pop-up We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia. We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.

Cambridge Consultants

THE ROLE   We have an opportunity for a Principal Engineer in our AI & Algorithms department, working with a particular focus on our defence and security clients. You’ll join a team of talented engineers and scientists designing, building and testing intelligent systems that require cutting edge algorithms. As one of the senior technical voices in the team, you’ll be architecting the algorithmic approach on our projects, setting the technical bar for others, and helping shape the work we deliver. As well as hands-on engineering, you’ll spend time with clients, using your expertise to win new projects as well as deliver them. You’ll work in multidisciplinary teams that use our labs and computing resources to enable us to deliver ambitious projects. Much of our defence and security work requires security clearance, so we ask for it up front. You won’t work exclusively in that sector, but a genuine interest in it matters to us.  We offer a flexible approach to hybrid working, although some of the projects you will be working on will require full-time working in the office. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING   * Applying data-driven software development in machine learning/AI, applied statistics, and sensor processing, alongside mathematical computing techniques such as digital signal processing, simulation, and numerical optimisation.  * Acting as technical lead and architect on our larger, more complex projects, owning the technical solution and the value it delivers to the client.  * Setting technical direction and acting as technical reviewer across the department, with your opinion sought by colleagues.  * Leading the development of proposals and costed work programmes, turning client problems into work we can win and deliver.  * Driving internal capability and demonstrators that keep us at the leading edge and open up new conversations with clients.  * Mentoring engineers and conducting technical interviews to help us recruit and grow strong people.  * Contributing to how the department works, improving our processes and technical standards.  WHAT YOU CAN BRING We are looking for an experienced engineer, with the breadth to lead the algorithmic component of multidisciplinary work and the ability to work with our commercial teams to help create and win new work. * 5+ years’ experience designing and delivering cutting edge algorithms for intelligent systems, including working on defence or security projects.  * Technical skills in one or more of: transformer models, diffusion models, reinforcement learning, machine vision and perception.  * A strong undergraduate degree in a relevant technical subject, such as AI/machine learning, computer science, mathematics or, physics. A PhD in a relevant subject is welcome but not required; deep, demonstrable industrial expertise is what matters.  * Strong Python and software engineering judgement. * The ability to architect the technical approach on complex projects and to review the work of others, including working autonomously as the technical authority.  * Experience mentoring and developing engineers.  * Experience working with non-technical stakeholders for your work.  * Interest in working directly with clients and contributing to proposals and sales conversations.  * A genuine affinity for working in the defence and security sector.   Because of where this role sits, holding (or being able to obtain) UK security clearance is essential. You must be eligible to obtain Security Check (SC) level security clearance (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/united-kingdom-security-vetting-applicant). You must be able to work in the UK without restrictions in accordance with UK National Law and be prepared to successfully undertake an appropriate level of UK National Security Vetting according to UK Government criteria.  While not essential requirements, we would also be very interested if you have experience with any of the following:  * Technical experience with any of: signal processing, edge computing, statistical modelling, numerical optimisation, or simulation.  * A track record of building client relationships and leading the technical side of sales campaigns and proposals.  * An established external profile: publications, conference talks or shareable project credentials  * A PhD or published research in a data-driven field   WHY CAMBRIDGE CONSULTANTS?  Cambridge Consultants creates exciting and novel breakthroughs in technology and products. Our work on intelligent systems area has helped create world-first and market-changing technologies including real-time AI-enhanced medical imaging, autonomous defence systems against cyberattacks, and edge algorithms to help visually impaired people navigate indoor spaces. We combine our research output with engineering rigour to create innovative and robust solutions to solve complex problems presented to us by our clients. We help clients across a diverse range of markets, including defence/security, healthcare, biotech, industrial and energy, so there is no shortage of variety.  At the heart of what we do are talented and motivated multi-disciplinary teams empowered to create cutting edge technologies and systems to solve difficult problems for our clients. We offer a diverse, fun, and challenging work environment where you'll have the chance to work on a wide variety of projects that deliver real value using technology.   We recognise and celebrate individual talent and we understand the importance of letting individuals be just that. Our people are here to do the best work of their lives and our job is to provide the platform for them to do it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By submitting an application to Cambridge Consultants, you confirm that the information provided in this application, together with any supporting documentation, is true, complete, and accurate to the best of your knowledge and belief. You understand that any false statement, misleading information, or material omission may render you liable to disqualification from the recruitment process, withdrawal of any offer of employment, or dismissal without notice if discovered following appointment. You acknowledge that the organisation reserves the right to verify the information supplied. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------