Role: Senior Solutions Architect
Salary: Competitive
Location: Canberra, Australia
Contract: Initial 6-month contract with the view to hire permanently
A note from the Founders
Oxford Dynamics is at an inflection point.
We operate in some of the most complex and high stakes environments in the world defence, national security, AI and robotics. The decisions we make now will define not just how fast we grow, but who we become.
You will work closely with all the team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day in the work we do.
If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose and by building something that genuinely matters, we would love to hear from you.
Who we are
Founded in 2020, Oxford Dynamics is a fast-growing UK deep-tech company developing both digital AI and physical AI systems designed to operate in dynamic, mission-critical environments.
Our flagship AVIS (A Very Intelligent System) platform fuses multi-modal data, including text, imagery, telemetry and sensor feeds, enabling operators to interrogate complex information at speed and make better decisions under pressure. We apply AVIS in the real world through platforms like STRIDER for CBRN applications and BARBARIAN for explosive ordnance detection.
Our ambition is simple but demanding: to converge AI and robotics so machines can sense, understand and act in complex, real-world environments. We work with defence and security organisations internationally to help protect nations, infrastructure and lives.
The Role
Technical expertise and the right stakeholder management and approach are both for equally important for this role. As our Senior Solutions Architect you will act as our in-country technical lead in a sovereign on-premises environment, owning the deployment, hardening and operation of our Kubernetes-based AI platform for a defence customer.
You will be working on behalf of Oxford Dynamics, on the ground at the customer site, working hand-in-hand with their teams to put our platform into production in a classified environment.
You will work closely with the UK engineering team remotely to bring the full weight of OD behind the deployment, while making the in-country judgement calls that keep things moving.
Requirements
Key Responsibilities
Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:
- Lead the on-premises deployment and hardening of the OD AI platform (Kubernetes-based) in a sovereign, classified environment.
- Own the Python microservices that underpin the platform: deployment, operation, performance tuning and integration with adjacent systems.
- Integrate and operate agentic AI / LLM orchestration components, including model serving, agent frameworks and retrieval pipelines.
- Translate customer C2 and ISR requirements into platform configurations and operational workflows.
- Maintain a tight working relationship with the UK engineering team daily collaboration, async working across time zones, clear escalation paths.
- Champion security hardening, observability and incident response appropriate to a classified, sovereign environment.
Requirements What you can bring to Oxford Dynamics
You will be expected to operate at multiple levels as a senior technical voice with the customer, as a hands-on engineer on the platform, and as the in-country face of OD's engineering function. Strong focus on delivery, attention to detail, and the judgement to make good calls.
Qualifications, experience and skills
- Active clearance required.
- Substantial experience and depth of expertise in platform engineering, solutions architecture or senior DevOps roles, with substantial production responsibility.
- Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise: cluster operations, Helm packaging, service meshes, and notably on-premises Kubernetes deployments.
- Strong production Python - microservices, APIs, async patterns, packaging and operational tooling.
- Demonstrable experience with agentic AI / LLM orchestration.
- Practical understanding of defence C2/ISR workflows.
- Act as in-country technical lead: represent OD's engineering function on site, drive technical decisions and own the embedded with customer technical relationship.
Soft skills
- Calm, judgement-led decision making under pressure.
- Strong communication skills and customer-facing credibility.
- Excellent teammate who can represent OD with credibility at senior stakeholder level.
Benefits
Why This Role?
You will be the senior face of Oxford Dynamics engineering at a strategically important deployment. The role offers the rare combination of deep technical work, deploying a real AI platform into a real classified environment with embedded customer contact and a direct line of sight to operational impact. If you have built complex systems in classified environments and want to lead a deployment that genuinely matters, we'd love to meet you.
Oxford Dynamics is committed to creating an inclusive team experience for all. Regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, or parental status, we believe our work is at its best when everyone feels free to be their authentic self.
