Staff Engineer (Tech Lead), Full-Stack

Who we are

4C Strategies builds organisational readiness and military training management software for clients in over 70 countries. Our flagship product, Exonaut®, is used by NATO and allied forces to plan, run and evaluate exercises in real time. Our consultants and engineers work alongside armed forces across the UK, Europe, North America and beyond to deliver training and exercise management solutions.

Your Role

Much of this hasn’t been designed yet — and that’s the point. We’re connecting Exonaut® to a fast-growing landscape of systems — a data lakehouse, customer ERP platforms, optimisation engines and partner platforms — on one of the most significant training transformation programmes in UK defence, and many of the hard problems are still open. We want a Staff Engineer to act as technical lead for the team: a full-stack engineer whose centre of gravity is backend and integration work, who is energised by that ambiguity and can take a vaguely-defined need, shape it with the team, and build it across the stack. You’ll lead through influence rather than formal authority, partnering closely with our Engineering Managers and Product Managers.

You’ll own and evolve parts of the Exonaut® platform itself, not just wire systems together — product engineering at the seams of several moving parts, from the services and APIs underneath to the interfaces people use. There’s a clear programme direction and a strong team around you; within that, scope will shift and you’ll have the autonomy to make the calls that matter.

This is a Staff role with real ownership. You’ll lead substantial pieces of work end-to-end — designing, choosing the right patterns, and seeing them through to production — and steward the technical direction across the team: the architecture, the standards, the tools, and how we test and observe what we build. You’ll still spend meaningful time hands-on in the code, with the balance gradually tilting toward leadership — your impact growing through the design sessions you lead, the engineers you mentor, and the architecture you shape across data, integrations and APIs.

Day to day you’ll collaborate with other engineers, project managers and designers on the programme, with senior stakeholders on the customer side, and with peers across the wider 4C engineering organisation — where the IC track is treated as a first-class career path alongside management.

What you’ll do

• Hold the technical vision for our work on the programme, in close partnership with Engineering Management, Product and Delivery — and stay close enough to the code to lead by example.

• Figure out and build how Exonaut talks to everything around it — a data lakehouse, customer ERP systems, optimisation engines and partner platforms — often from a rough idea rather than a finished spec, reading and writing data reliably with maintainability, observability and security designed in from the start.

• Build full-stack features on the Exonaut® platform — the backend services and APIs, and the user-facing interfaces on top of them — so the systems you connect are matched by interfaces people can actually use.

• Work across a modern stack — Java and SQL on the backend, Angular on the front-end, plus pipeline and data tooling — making real architecture calls rather than inheriting someone else’s, so judgement and pragmatism matter more than experience with any one tool. Introduce event-driven and change-data-capture (CDC) patterns where they keep data flowing in near-real-time.

• Lead design sessions and steward the architecture across data, integrations and APIs — driving simplicity and sustainability so the calls we make today still serve the programme years from now.

• Help raise our engineering standards around code quality, automated testing, CI/CD and observability — building the pipelines and test automation that let us ship changes safely and often, with quality and operability treated as first-class engineering concerns, not an afterthought.

• Mentor and coach engineers across the team — not just juniors — mentoring Senior Engineers toward Staff-level scope, and help grow our full-stack and integration engineering practice inside 4C.

• Represent engineering thoughtfully with customers, partners and 4C peers — presenting technical work externally and making sure the engineering perspective has a strong voice in cross-functional and customer settings.

• Work directly with stakeholders on both sides — our own project managers, designers and engineers, and the customer’s technical and non-technical people — drawing out what’s really needed, explaining technical trade-offs in plain language, and making sure what we build genuinely serves the people who use it.

About you

• An experienced full-stack engineer who still enjoys writing code, with several years operating at Senior Engineer level or above and a track record of guiding non-trivial technical work across a team or cluster of teams. Your centre of gravity is backend and data, and you’re comfortable working up the stack into the user-facing layer — so this suits a backend-leaning full-stack engineer rather than a front-end specialist.

• Comfortable building backend services and APIs (REST and/or event-based), integrating with third-party systems such as ERP platforms, data stores and external engines, and building the front-end on top — with a good grasp of integration patterns, authentication and performance.

• Strong Java and SQL, with working familiarity with Angular (or a comparable modern front-end framework). We care more about depth and judgement than about an exact match — if you’re strong in a neighbouring backend language and willing to work in Java, we’d still like to hear from you. You treat version control, code review, automated testing and CI/CD as part of building, not a separate phase.

• Comfortable being a team’s technical point of reference — you lead through influence, partnership and consistently good judgement.

• Energised rather than unsettled by ambiguity: you can pick up a new stack quickly, you’re happy to define the problem rather than only solve a specified one, and you make sound calls when requirements are still moving. We care more about that than about any specific technology you already know.

• Sound judgement around system and data design — including integrating with a data warehouse / lakehouse — and good instincts for when to use streaming or event-driven approaches versus batch.

• Pragmatic about quality: you instrument what you build and care as much about how it runs in production as how it looks in code review.

• A strong communicator who can hold a technical conversation with engineers and a plain-language one with project managers, designers and senior customer stakeholders — internal and external, including in regulated environments.

• A mentor who lifts the people around you and spreads good practice — you can point to engineers whose growth you’ve helped shape.

• Fluent written and spoken English, as required for security-cleared defence work and for clear communication with UK customer stakeholders.

• This role requires the successful candidate to be a UK national and eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC). Candidates who already hold current UK SC clearance will be at an advantage; however, we also welcome applications from individuals who meet the eligibility requirements and are willing to undergo the SC clearance process.

• A genuine interest in our mission — software that helps armed forces, public safety and resilience organisations train, prepare, a