Design Engineer
Security clearance: This role requires eligibility for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC). SC requires 5 years of continuous UK residency. If you are not currently eligible, please do not apply.
A work sample is required to apply for this role. Share something you built - a live URL, a GitHub repo, a case study. Show us a design decision you made and the thing you shipped as a result. Personal projects are fine.
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 the whole team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business. And you will see the impact of your work every day.
If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters - we would love to hear from you.
This role in one sentence
You have an instinct for what good looks like - and you've built the technical skills to make it real, fast.
What this role is
Most design roles separate thinking from building. This one doesn't.
You design and build in the same motion. You take a rough brief - a Slack message, a whiteboard sketch, a "what if we showed them this?" - and produce something working and considered quickly. Not rough-and-ready. Working and considered.
Your prototypes become the blueprint. Production teams build from what you prove works. That means the quality of your design instinct directly shapes the quality of our products - permanently.
You'll work directly with the CTO, product leads, and business development. One week it's a tactical map UI for ORION (autonomous decision-making for Defence). The next it's an analyst dashboard. The next it's a pitch demo for AVIS (agentic AI) or STRIDER (tactical robotics). The brief will always be ambiguous. The output must always be sharp.
Reports to: CTO
What you won't be doing
- Writing production backend services
- Sitting in two-hour planning meetings
- Writing Jira tickets about Jira tickets
- Designing by committee
You should know
- We work in defence and national security. Some of what we build can't be shown publicly.
- This is a small company (under 40 people). You'll have creative autonomy within a product portfolio that spans defence, maritime, and AI.
- As OD scales, this role grows into leading a design engineering function - setting the visual and interaction language across all our products.