Staff Software Engineer

About Pelagon Pelagon is a European defence technology company building Autonomous Maritime Interdiction systems. We bring together sensing, AI, software and maritime engineering to help protect critical infrastructure and maritime environments. The role We are looking for a very senior, hands-on software engineer to own the software running in Pelagon’s operations centre: our data infrastructure, processing services, internal tools and customer-facing applications. You will architect the overall platform and build it with the team, from data ingestion and storage to machine-learning workloads, operational applications and deployment. You will be the technical interface between our embedded systems and AI teams, bringing their work together into a coherent, reliable system. This role requires depth across software development, data engineering and DevOps. Our software must run on infrastructure operated by Pelagon or our customers, including self-hosted and on-premises environments. Robustness, operability and cybersecurity must be designed into the system from the outset. What you will own Software architecture and delivery. Define the architecture of our core services, APIs, internal tools and customer-facing applications. Make and document technical decisions, write production code and take responsibility for the system from design through operation. Data infrastructure at scale. Build reliable ingestion, storage and retrieval for large volumes of sensor and operational data. Choose and operate databases and storage systems, design data models, and manage data quality, migrations, retention and performance. Processing and machine-learning workflows. Build the infrastructure to schedule, execute and monitor data-processing and ML jobs. Handle dependencies, resource allocation, retries, reproducibility and failure recovery, working closely with the AI team to bring its workloads into production. Deployment on infrastructure we control. Make the platform reproducibly deployable on Pelagon and customer infrastructure. Own infrastructure automation, software packaging, configuration, release pipelines, upgrades and rollback without depending on managed cloud services. Reliability and operations. Establish observability, performance testing, capacity planning, backup and recovery. Diagnose production issues and build systems that recover predictably from interrupted connectivity, partial failures and faulty inputs. Cybersecurity throughout the lifecycle. Build security into architecture, implementation, deployment and maintenance. Apply threat modelling, least-privilege access, authentication and authorisation, network isolation, secrets management, encryption and audit logging. Establish secure development practices, dependency and vulnerability management, patching and incident readiness. Integration across teams. Define clear interfaces and data contracts with the embedded systems and AI teams. Own integration and end-to-end testing so devices, d