Senior Software Engineer

About Sand

Sand Technologies is a global Physical AI company using data and AI to make critical industries work better. We partner with governments, cities and enterprises to improve how essential systems operate across healthcare, water, energy, telecommunications and infrastructure.

Our work delivers proven real-world impact. We have built AI systems that help manage London's water supply, supported telecom network planning across hundreds of cities, and developed digital healthcare platforms serving tens of millions of people across Africa. From intelligent command centers to AI-powered infrastructure platforms, we help organizations sense, analyze and act in complex environments.

Our people are ambitious, curious and relentlessly practical. Our teams work alongside clients in the field, solving hard problems and deploying solutions that last. With colleagues across Africa, Europe, the UK and the US, we operate across the full stack - from research and engineering to deployment and capability building.

Our mission is simple: to harness AI to solve humanity's most pressing challenges.

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our UK utilities practice. This is a permanent role. Your first assignment is building an AI-enabled situational awareness and decision-support solution on Microsoft Azure for a major UK water utility, and from there you will continue delivering across our growing portfolio of water and energy utility clients.

Our delivery squads run deliberately small software engineering teams, so this role must be genuinely full-stack and self-sufficient: owning both the back-end services that serve model outputs and analytical risk indices, and the operator-facing web front end that puts them in front of control-room users. You will take direction from the Technical Lead and Solution Architect and turn it into shipped, production-quality features, while setting the engineering standards mid-level colleagues build on.

While our Data Scientists and Data Engineers handle model creation and data pipelines, you will build the secure, high-performance applications and APIs that bring those insights to operators making real decisions about critical national infrastructure – so reliability, security and clarity matter.

What you’ll do

• Build the application end to end: Design, build and maintain the back-end services and APIs that serve model outputs and analytical indices, and the operator-facing web front end for situational awareness and decision support.
• Own engineering standards: Set up CI/CD pipelines, environments, testing, code review and observability on Azure, and establish practices a small cross-functional squad can sustain at pace.
• Integrate with AI and data: Collaborate closely with data engineering and data science specialists on API contracts and integration points, consuming their pipelines and integrating AI/model outputs into the product.
• Deploy and run on Azure: Build and deploy applications on Microsoft Azure (e.g. App Service, AKS, containers), ensuring availability, security and low-latency performance.
• Ship and support: Translate the Technical Lead’s and Solution Architect’s decisions into working software; support end-to-end testing and the user acceptance testing phase.
• Mentor: Guide mid-level engineers, fostering continuous technical improvement in small teams.

Who you are

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of deploying robust, production software – ideally with exposure to water, utilities or other critical/smart-infrastructure environments.
• Genuinely full-stack: strong front-end development (React and modern JavaScript/TypeScript essential) plus solid back-end experience (Python/Django, Node or .NET).
• Production experience deploying and running applications on a major cloud platform – Azure strongly preferred (App Service, AKS, containers).
• Strong API design skills, with a solid grasp of authentication/security and integration with data services.
• Experience with automated testing (unit, component and browser testing) and CI/CD.
• Data visualisation and SQL database design and usage.
• Able to work autonomously, own features end to end in a small team, and communicate clearly with distributed colleagues and client-side stakeholders in regulated environments.

Desirable

• Experience with real-time or event-driven UIs, operational dashboards or control-room software.
• Experience with high-volume or real-time data systems; familiarity with time-series databases or telemetry/IoT data.
• Experience mentoring mid-level or junior engineers.
• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.

How we work

Due to the highly collaborative and internationally distributed nature of our work, successful candidates must be comfortable operating in small teams while contributing to larger, globally coordinated efforts. A strong sense of ownership, self-motivation and discipline in maintaining clear and consistent communication through virtual collaboration tools and video conferencing is essential.