Lead Software Engineer

About

Saab UK is part of Scandinavia's largest defence company, bringing together the best of Swedish and British innovation. Saab offers world‑leading solutions and services in defence, aviation, space, and civil security to keep people and society safe. Our UK presence has been growing at pace, meaning we can offer a wide range of opportunities for personal fulfilment and career growth. We currently employ over 600 people across eight sites in the UK, and our specialisations include software engineering, underwater robotics, radars, AI, and armed forces training.

Role

To design and implement software solutions for underwater robotics applications in line with the company’s business needs through innovation, creativity and professionalism.
Reporting to the Software Manager, the Software Lead role involves taking responsibility for the delivery of projects and leading multidisciplinary teams to deliver technically complex software projects for subsea vehicles and associated robotic functions. The role requires binding inputs from several differing software and engineering disciplines and supporting functions to successfully deliver the software content for Saab products.

Qualifications and Skills

Required Skills

• Minimum of 7 years' experience as a Senior Engineer
• Degree in a relevant Engineering Discipline
• Broad understanding of software from embedded through to applications
• Experience leading multi‑disciplined teams of software engineers
• Ability to develop a software architecture for complex systems from scratch
• Sound understanding of modern software methods and technologies
• Ability to maintain a system‑level approach and not get lost in detail
• Ability to develop system‑level requirements and derive lower‑level requirements to achieve these
• Sound understanding of safety concepts and design
• Ability to interface directly with customers
• Ability to act as a technical authority
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders
• Ability to estimate work content and duration
• Ability to plan work loading for teams ensuring no team member is overloaded
• Ability to develop and instigate processes to ensure industry best practice is achieved
• Ability to ensure appropriate levels of Software Quality are achieved for projects
• Ability to mentor and develop junior engineers
• Ability to delegate tasks
• Ability to manage resources and budgets
• Practical understanding of standards and application of standards
• Appreciation of Cyber Security and its impacts on design

Software skills (Windows and Linux)

• C++
• JavaScript
• Python
• XML
• JSON
• HTML
• CSS
• Web backend servers (Angular, Django, NodeJS, React, Apache or similar)
• Web Sockets
• Docker
• TCP‑IP / UDP
• SQL or other databases
• Dev tools (Wireshark, system log interrogation, etc.)
• Databases
• Cyber Security

Desirable

• Exposure to IP video and video routing
• Familiarity in design and testing of control software
• Familiarity with systems serving Real‑Time Information via Web Sockets
• Use of DDS and interfacing with it
• Message Queues (Active MQ / Rabbit MQ / ZeroMQ)
• GUI Development experience (.Net GUI framework, Qt 6.2 or previous versions)
• Developing and debugging application software in Visual Studio (2013, 2017, 2022)
• Customer‑facing APIs using web technologies