🚀 Build the Intelligence Layer for Critical Infrastructure
Critical infrastructure projects across energy, water and transport still fail because delivery teams can’t clearly see what’s happening on the ground.Sensat is the infrastructure intelligence platform changing that. We give teams real-world project visibility so they can identify safety and design risks earlier, review constraints remotely and keep everyone aligned.
We already have a strong engineering team and real momentum behind us, with US expansion underway and Series C on the horizon. Now, we’re tackling our next set of technical challenges: agentic workflows, knowledge graphs, large-scale data ingestion and new ways to stream, model and analyse complex geospatial data.
We’re looking for a Senior or Staff Engineer with serious depth in backend, data and distributed systems. This is a hands-on individual contributor role, your impact will be technical, not managerial.
🛠️ What you'll be doing
You’ll be responsible for:- Owning and evolving key architectural decisions across our services, data flows and platform.
- Designing the foundations for ingesting, modelling, storing, querying and serving large-scale geospatial data.
- Developing mezzanine formats and data models that support increasingly complex streaming, analysis and product workflows.
- Shaping our knowledge and intelligence layer using knowledge graphs, vector embeddings, agentic frameworks, orchestration and MCP-style protocols.
- Building hands-on across our backend and data stack, including Golang, Python, Postgres, DuckDB, LanceDB, AWS and GCP.
- Challenging technical decisions that won’t hold up under the scale and complexity ahead. We’re not wedded to our current stack and want you to help it evolve.
- Raising engineering standards across system design, code review, testing and documentation through doing as much as advising.
- Helping the team use AI-assisted development tools effectively without compromising quality, security or engineering judgement.
- Working closely with Product, our Engineering Lead and the wider team to keep technical direction aligned with customer outcomes.
💭 You might be the kind of person we’re looking for if...
You’re drawn to the hard parts of data and distributed systems: ingestion, modelling, storage formats, retrieval and performance at scale.You’re as comfortable working through system design as you are writing the code, and you want real influence over the architectural direction.
You probably read about agentic systems, knowledge graphs, rendering pipelines or large-scale data formats because you’re genuinely interested. You may even have looked at something like Google Earth and wondered how you could deliver higher-resolution data, faster.
You enjoy niche, unsolved technical problems and can make good decisions without waiting for perfect information.
This probably won’t be for you if you want a tightly defined lane, prefer to hand work between specialist teams or need established answers and processes before getting started.
🎯 Your experience might look something like this…
- Deep experience across backend engineering, data architecture or distributed systems.
- Strong knowledge of large-scale ingestion pipelines, data modelling, storage formats, retrieval systems, semantic data design or knowledge graphs.
- The ability to take a large, messy, high-volume dataset and design structures that make it usable, queryable and fast—not simply storable.
- Practical experience using agentic systems and AI tooling in production, such as vector embeddings, orchestration frameworks, MCP or similar protocols.
- Strong judgement around when to build something internally and when to integrate existing technology.
- Experience working in a startup or scale-up where you’ve needed to move quickly and make decisions without a complete map.
- Strong technical opinions that you can clearly explain, while remaining open to changing your mind when there’s a better solution.
- An interest in geospatial technology, spatial computing or GeoAI.
- Exposure to large-scale rendering or 3D geospatial data formats.
- Some frontend knowledge, ideally Angular or a similar framework.
- Side projects, open-source contributions or research-led experimentation.
- Experience within infrastructure, construction or engineering software.
You enjoy going deep in your strongest area while mentoring others and contributing across the wider system.
Most importantly, you want the freedom to tackle genuinely difficult problems, challenge the existing approach and stretch beyond your current technical lane.
🤝 Why Sensat?Most engineering roles don’t give you the opportunity to work across large-scale geospatial data, AI-powered intelligence and real-world infrastructure problems in the same place.
The systems you help build will support organisations responsible for the energy, water and transport infrastructure millions of people rely on every day.
There’s already a capable engineering team and strong technical foundations in place. What we need now is someone who can bring deeper architectural expertise, take ownership of the hard technical decisions and help us build for the scale ahead.
You’ll have room to experiment, challenge the stack and make a genuine mark on both the platform and the way our engineering team works.
If solving genuinely hard technical problems and building systems that last sounds like your kind of challenge, we’d love to hear from you.
Benefits
🏝️Take a break using your 30 days of annual leave (in addition to bank holidays)🌎 A flexible working environment🎓 Continue learning every day through your £500 personal development fund🥳 Regular social events! We’ve been to the theatre, racing around the tracks go-karting, had movie nights, watched the London Symphony Orchestra, line dancing lessons and murder mystery...💓 We’ve got your back, be it immediate access to mental health support through Spill or enhanced Family Leave for those welcoming a new arrival, we support you throughout your journey here.🩺 We care about our people and want to make essential healthcare accessible and affordable. That’s why we have an Opt-in Corporate health and wellbeing cash plan (offering up to £1700 in cash back annually) provided through BHSF.💻 We want to enable you to do your best work without having to think about whether your tech will work, so we'll set you up with a MacBook, mouse & keyboard and £250 towards setting up your WFH environment.💸 Pension: with Penfold. Employer contribution of 3%, employee contribution set at 5% but can be increased (relief at source or salary sacrifice).🏋 Access to the benefits of our Fora office membership, including access to their gyms and fitness classes, events and dog friendly office🚲 Other benefits including cycle to work scheme, season ticket loans, eye-care vouchers, payroll giving📍 London, Shoreditch | Hybrid -2 days per week in the office👤 Reporting to our Head of Engineering
At this time, we are only able to accept applications from those who have a right to work in the United Kingdom. Our office is in Old Street, London.