Full Stack Engineer
Contract | 6 months+ | UK hybrid | Active SC required
Morela is proud to be supporting a sovereign AI business whose software has to run where most software cannot: offline, locked down, and under real scrutiny. Their platform is an AI operating system built for exactly those conditions.
They are well funded, growing quickly, and already live on serious government and commercial programmes. The engineering team is small and senior, so nobody here is a spare pair of hands.
The Job
You would sit inside the delivery team on a defence programme and build across the whole stack. Python services and pipelines at one end, the TypeScript front end that operators actually use at the other. The environments you ship into have no internet, the deadlines do not move, and the requirements will.
It is a high trust seat. You take a problem from a conversation with the customer through to something running in production, and you are the one on site when it needs fixing. In exchange you get properly hard problems, senior people around you, and real influence over a product that matters.
Not many engineers get this close to sovereign AI in defence. What is being built here will shape how these organisations work for years.
What the Work Looks Like
- Building and maintaining features top to bottom: Python back end services and APIs, React and TypeScript on the front.
- Getting software into secure, air-gapped and sensitive environments, which means on-site deployment, integration and troubleshooting.
- Owning features properly. Scope it with the technical lead, CTO and customer, build it, test it, ship it, then support it.
- Containerising services and shaping how the platform runs on Kubernetes and bare-metal Linux.
- Writing code you would be happy to inherit, and holding that same line in review.
- Fixing production problems calmly, usually with less tooling than you would like and someone waiting on you.
- Working alongside the data, AI and platform engineers so models, pipelines and infrastructure land as one product rather than three.
- Improving the day to day: CI/CD, observability, security hardening, documentation.
- Sitting in front of customers and partners and turning what they need into something buildable.
What You Will Need
- Python. Serious commercial experience building back end services, APIs and tooling. FastAPI, Django, Flask, whichever you have used in anger.
- TypeScript. Serious commercial experience on modern front ends with React, Vue or Angular.
- Linux. Properly comfortable without a GUI: shell, networking, processes, permissions, systemd, packages, and working out why a host is misbehaving.
- Full stack delivery. A track record of shipping whole features from database to browser, relational databases and SQL included.
- Containers and CI/CD. Docker plus automated build, test and deploy pipelines.
- Composure. You have delivered against customer deadlines that do not slip, and you get methodical rather than frantic when something breaks.
- Secure environment fit. Happy following strict security and handling procedures, and getting to UK customer sites when the programme needs you there.
- Communication. Clear with engineers and with customers who are not engineers.
- Clearance. Current, active SC. You must be UK based and able to hold and maintain UK clearance.
What Would Put You Ahead
- Delivery into defence, national security or another heavily regulated sector.
- Running software in air-gapped or disconnected environments, including offline dependencies and moving artefacts across the boundary.
- Good instincts on secure development, authentication, authorisation and secrets management.
- Putting AI or ML models into production, LLM features included.
- Infrastructure as code with Terraform, Ansible or similar, plus configuration management.
- Observability and incident response: metrics, logging, tracing.
- Message queues, event-driven architectures or data pipelines.
Also Welcome
- Kubernetes. Deploying, running or debugging workloads, including K3s, RKE2 or OpenShift.
- Data at scale. Spark, Trino, Parquet, Iceberg or similar columnar and distributed query tooling.
- GPU workloads and serving models on-premise.
- Open source contributions or a portfolio worth a look.
- Mentoring engineers or leading a small delivery team.
- DV clearance, or eligibility for it.
Interested? Get in touch with Morela for a confidential conversation.