Improbable are hiring a Full Stack Engineer (Solution Delivery Team, Defence)

We believe that the grand scale adoption of single synthetic environments by governments and international institutions will give rise to a powerful capability for global good. New levels of whole force preparedness and the harnessing of previously unattainable foresight will ultimately prevent states from stumbling into war; contributing to a more secure and prosperous world and bringing about the end of unnecessary human conflict.

Improbable Defence develops a software platform that enables the creation of these single synthetic environments, with the aim of providing truly full spectrum synthetic training and planning platforms. This will ultimately make defence users more effective when deployed on modern, multi-domain operations and plummet the cost of military preparedness.

Single synthetic environments give decision makers a constantly improving picture on how to best prepare for and prevail in any conflict. Improbable’s platform architecture provides the defence industry access to new market opportunities through a synthetic content ecosystem, enabling defence developers to reuse and repurpose existing models and build new models of the real world in a fast, efficient and iterative way.

Solution Delivery Team, Defence

Our Mission

Solution Delivery is responsible for the successful delivery of our customer & partner projects. We deliver solutions that are user-focused in order to solve user problems.

About us

We are a team of engineers who work closely with our product and product design functions to build novel solutions to our customer’s problems. We are part of the Customer & Partner Success group and have specific focus areas in UI/UX and in the service layer that interfaces with the simulation platform.

Our front-ends enable complex interactions and analytics on top of the simulation platform specifically designed for rapidly evaluating military strategies under uncertain operating conditions. Our solutions are used to visualise faster than real-time simulations that radically improve training, preparation and decision making. They are also used as part of the training process itself.

Our service and data layer is a new offering of this team, and is currently being architected. We’re looking for expertise to help shape this.

Our Impact

The Solution Delivery team is responsible for everything our wide range of users see and interact with. The technology we build has the potential to be immensely impactful for our users. Our team, therefore, has the difficult challenge of taking complex data and interactions and making them accessible to users.

We work very closely with users to distill what their problems are and how we can best solve them. We then rapidly iterate on designing, building and validating that anything we are deploying solves our user critical problems.

What are we doing?

We are working on a number of customer projects building web applications for operational planning, tactical training, and decision support. We are very early in our journey and there are various parts to this that are worth unpacking.

These applications allow users to create and design plans for scenarios to be simulated. This includes physical elements such as placing units on a map as well orchestrating their movements over time, but extends much further to include other domains and elements, such as economic, information and diplomatic interventions. For this we use mapbox-gl, along with various sources of geospatial data.

Secondly, our applications are the interface to the simulation engine. Users can run complex models, many times, at scale. A critical part of the value we deliver for clients is letting them leverage complex data generated by the models for better analytics. This involves designing and building solutions to how we visualise information, both geospatially and temporally. The data visualisation work is done in close collaboration with scientific modellers in the division. We especially love high performance rendering, using WebGL and libraries like deck.gl.

As a team we strive to balance how we build, such that we can move quickly and adapt to change, whilst building a robust and performant solution. To facilitate this, we invest heavily in our design system and a reusable component library.

The primary front-end technologies we currently use are Typescript, React, Redux, and gRPC. The primary back-end and orchestration technologies we use are Node, Go, Python, ArangoDB, Docker and Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• You will contribute to opinions, best practices and technology choices to set us up for delivering the best possible solutions to our customers.
• You will be an engineer for back-end service and data architectures, and front-end web applications, with a slight focus towards the back-end.
• You will work closely with product managers, designers and scientific modellers to help determine and design what we will build.
• Write coherent, logically abstracted and well structured code.
• Collaborate closely and effectively with members of other engineering teams to find the best path to delivering a high quality solution.

Additional Responsibilities for a Senior (if applying to this role)

• You will determine the best methods for extracting long-term product value from our customer projects.
• You will be the Solution Delivery lead on customer projects to ensure the technical and delivery success of the project.
• You will help to grow and mentor a team of full stack and front-end engineers. You will help to develop and share knowledge within the team.
• You will help to identify skill gaps in our team and help with assessing and interviewing candidates.

Requirements

• Experience engineering back-end microservice architectures.
• Experience configuring and deploying database technologies (relational and document-based)
• Experience working on Single Page Web Applications with a modern framework (React, Vue, Angular etc.)
• Node, Python, GoLang, Typescript, React, AQL, gRPC are a plus but are not mandatory

Opportunities for Growth & Progression

You will have the opportunity to work with a range of engineering and research teams, leveraging new techniques and growing as an engineer. As an early member of the team, it’s expected that you will be able to take on ownership of key aspects of the system.

Logistics

Role Location

Based in London, UK head office. Some level of flexible working post Covid-19.

Reporting Lines

Reporting to the Engineering Manager of the Solution Delivery team, Angela Wigmore, who in turn is part of the UK engineering organisation reporting to the head of Customer & Partner Success.

Interview & Assessment

Interview Process & Timelines

1. Call with Talent Team
2. Remote Interview - shared coding exercise and meet with the hiring manager.
3. Onsite interview - mix of practical engineering interviews, design interviews and behavioural interviews
4. Final Fit interview with VP - focus on motivations, mission alignment