Staff Software Engineer

About Adarga

Adarga builds AI systems for customers working in Defence, Security and Resilience. With a core focus on our multimodal data fusion platform, we combine the value of humans and agents to transform information overload into decision advantage.

Our team is a hybrid of domain specialists and technologists. We believe this layering of experience is key to building cutting edge AI that is operationally relevant. With our foundations set in NLP, computational linguistics and graph technology we now draw on the latest ideas in agentic AI and knowledge representation, as we set our sights firmly on defining and building the next era of sovereign AI capability.

To work at Adarga you have to care deeply about the mission. We exist to support those with the ultimate task: upholding the liberties and values that define our society. We want people who are comfortable with uncertainty, who want to own decisions, who want to drive a vision.

About the role

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will partner with our Chief Architect as a technical peer, own major parts of the platform end-to-end, and help drive the technical vision for what Adarga builds next. You are accountable for keeping us at the frontier of what is technically possible.

You ship a lot, and you help everyone around you ship more. You communicate clearly across the business, with engineering, product, commercial, security, and mission stakeholders, translating technical reality into decisions the company can act on. You treat AI-assisted development as a core engineering practice rather than a side experiment, integrating it into how we design, write, review, test, and operate software.

What you will do

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for a major component of our data platform, accountable to the Chief Architect for its long-term coherence, performance, and operability.
• Lead multi-team technical initiatives end to end: identify the problem, scope the work, write the design, align stakeholders, and stay engaged through delivery and operation.
• Set engineering standards across the company. Define how we build, test, deploy, and operate distributed systems that handle multimodal data and agentic workloads. Drive adoption through influence and worked examples.
• Make and document the hard tradeoffs: build versus buy, abstraction versus speed, generality versus fit for a specific mission.
• Shape our deployment story across managed cloud, customer cloud, on premises, edge, and airgapped contexts.
• Set the technical direction for our agent framework, integrating existing architectures and emerging alternatives.
• Lead how Adarga uses AI-assisted development across the engineering organisation. Define the patterns, evaluate the tooling, and raise the floor of what every engineer can ship per week.
• Raise the bar of engineers around you. Mentor others. Run design reviews. Unblock teams that are stuck.
• Partner with Security, Product, and Mission stakeholders to ensure our architecture meets the access control, data protection, integrity, and accreditation demands of the environments we operate in.
• Represent Adarga engineering externally where useful: in customer technical conversations, in supplier and partner discussions, and in the community.