Senior Software Engineer

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About Orbital

Orbital and our schema language Taxi are rethinking enterprise integration - for developers and AI agents. The old ways - gluing together endpoints with brittle spaghetti code - don’t work, regardless of who’s doing the coding, developer or agent. iPaaS platforms haven’t helped. We’re building something different.

Orbital solves this with semantic layers - instead of cranking glue-code by hand, you describe what data you need (in Taxi) and Orbital figures out how to get it. The result: integrations in milliseconds that are deterministic, secure, self-repairing, auditable, observable, and scalable.

We’re already deployed in banks and financial institutions, and we’re looking for someone to join to build awareness and help improve our product.

You’ll be working on both Orbital - our data integration platform, and Taxi - our open source language (and ecosystem) for building semantic layers.

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What you'll work on

Everyone works on everything here. You’ll spend a lot of your time in the Kotlin backend - but you’ll touch the full stack.

Orbital — the integration platform itself. Streaming data pipelines, query execution, API composition, schema resolution. The problems are genuinely hard and the feedback loop is short - you’ll see your work running in production at real financial institutions.

Taxi - our open-source schema language. You’ll work on the compiler, the type system, and the query engine. If you haven’t built a compiler before, that’s fine - you’ll learn. If you have, you’ll appreciate how much interesting design work is still ahead.

Luna - our AI agent, built on Spring AI. This is greenfield. We’re building an agent that understands semantic schemas and can orchestrate integrations autonomously.

The frontend - Angular primarily, with a little React. You don’t need to be a frontend specialist, but you should be willing to jump in and build UI when needed.

In a given week you might be working on a query planner optimisation issue; profile, debug and fix a performance bottleneck; implement new Taxi language features and compiler backend, and then prototype an agent capability.

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What we're looking for

You write Kotlin. This is the backbone of everything we build - Spring for our runtimes, pure Kotlin for the rest. If you haven’t used it before, but have strong experience in modern Java (17+), and are a quick learner, you’ll be fine.

You understand reactive streams. Flux, Mono, coroutines, backpressure — you’ve worked with at least one reactive paradigm and you understand why it matters for streaming data.

You think in types and schemas. You’ve worked with at least one schema language — OpenAPI, Avro, Protobuf, whatever. More importantly, you understand why schemas matter: contracts, validation, interop, trust.

You’re aware of event-driven architecture. You understand async messaging patterns, pub/sub, and why systems get built this way. Experience with Kafka or RabbitMQ is a plus, but understanding the concepts matters more than any specific broker.

You write tests early. We’re not TDD purists, but we have strong test coverage and we use it to move fast with confidence. You should be the kind of engineer who feels nervous shipping without tests, not the kind who bolts them on at the end.

You care about clean code. Design patterns, sensible abstractions, code that your future self won’t hate. Not architecture astronautics — pragmatic, readable code that holds up under change.

You’re curious, and enjoy learning. Nobody here is an expert in everything - we value curiosity, adaptability, and strong engineering fundamentals.

You can work across the stack. Our frontend is Angular, but if you’ve built things in React, Vue, or anything modern, you’ll pick it up. We care more about your willingness to jump in than your specific framework experience.

You work with AI, not around it. You actively use AI assisted coding tools to move faster. You’re curious about what LLMs can and can’t do, and you’re not waiting to be told to try them.

You communicate well in English. We’re a distributed team. Written communication is how most of our collaboration happens — Slack, PRs, docs. Fluent English is essential.

You have at least 5 years of professional experience. You’ve shipped production systems, learned from real-world complexity, and know how to balance thoughtful engineering with pragmatic delivery.

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How you'll need to work

Autonomously. We’re a small team. You’ll have context, you’ll have support, but you won’t have someone assigning you tickets every morning. You need to be able to pick up a problem, figure out what needs doing, and do it.

Collaboratively. Things will break. Priorities will shift. Customers will find creative ways to stress the product. We need someone who stays constructive when things go wrong — not someone who assigns blame or goes quiet.

With customer empathy. Everyone at Orbital talks to customers. You’ll hear directly from the people using what you build, and you’ll care about making their experience better. We care deeply about delivering amazing developer and user experiences.

Out loud. We expect everyone to share what they’re working on — internally and externally. You don’t need to be a conference keynote speaker, but you should be comfortable writing about interesting problems you’ve solved and excited about showing your work.

At startup pace. We’re a small team with big ambitions. Some days are scrappy. If that energises you, great. If you need everything to be well-defined before you start, this probably isn’t the right fit.

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Nice to have

• Kafka, RabbitMQ, or event streaming platform experience
• Angular / TypeScript specifically
• Deep Kotlin/JVM ecosystem knowledge
• Experience with compiler design, language tooling, or query engines
• Experience with Spring AI or LLM-based agent systems
• Experience in financial services or enterprise integration
• A blog, conference talks, or open-source contributions — anything that shows you like sharing what you learn

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• Competitive salary
• Full-time, permanent role
• Remote-first (we work in UK-friendly timezones). We’ll consider candidates anywhere we can make the tax and legals work. Ability to meet up in London is nice, but not essential.
• Budget for conferences, learning, and development
• Hardware and tooling budget

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What we offer

• Competitive salary and early-stage equity
• Remote-first (we work in UK timezones). Ability to meet up in London is nice, but not essential.
• Budget for conferences, community events, and travel
• Hardware and tooling budget

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How to apply

Send us a note at careers@orbitalhq.com. Tell us what you’ve shipped, point us at something you’ve written or recorded, and let us know why this role caught your eye.