Senior Backend Engineer

📋 Description

• • We're an AI-first industrial company building hardware from the atoms up, with a goal to lead an industrial renaissance to advance critical technologies and secure our planet for generations to come.
• • We have an ambitious mission and need excellent people in all our teams - AI research, operations, advanced materials, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and manufacturing.
• • Working at Orbital means working in tightly integrated, vertically integrated teams.
• • We’re looking for people who have a love of physical technology, curiosity in AI and a desire to learn.
• • Orbital’s internal AI software platform, Curie, is used by our materials scientists, hardware engineers and manufacturing engineers to design and build our products serving critical industries.
• • As a Backend Engineer at Orbital you will design, build and operate the core systems powering Curie.
• • You will work across the full backend stack: APIs, data pipelines, graph databases, event-driven architectures and the infrastructure that connects our AI models to the tools our scientists and engineers use daily.
• • First and foremost, we want to work with someone with a love of craftsmanship, continual learning and building systems that scale.
• • KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
• • Build and operate core backend systems
• • Drive engineering quality
• • Collaborate across the team
• • WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
• • Backend engineering experience with strong programming skills
• • Proven experience designing, building and operating backend systems in production — APIs, data pipelines, event-driven architectures or similar
• • Strong fundamentals in at least one backend language (e.g. Python, Go, Rust, Java/Kotlin) and comfort working across the stack when needed
• • Experience with databases (relational and/or graph), message queues, caching layers and cloud infrastructure
• • A track record of shipping and iterating on software that real users depend on, with a strong sense of what makes systems reliable and maintainable
• • The ability to reason about system design, data modelling and engineering trade-offs — and to communicate these effectively
• • An ability to debug complex distributed systems through meticulous attention to detail, structured investigation and carefully chosen instrumentation
• • A genuine interest in building software that enables breakthrough scientific and industrial applications
• • Upon reading Hamming's You and Your Research, you resonate with quotes such as:
• • 'Yes, I would like to do first-class work'
• • 'You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, 'Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.''
• • 'Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class'
• • Bonus: Previous experience working in an AI/ML environment, familiarity with the workflows, tooling and pace of AI teams is a real advantage. Experience with graph databases, knowledge graphs or scientific data platforms. Experience with infrastructure-as-code, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes) or CI/CD pipelines.
• • Orbital is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.