Ocean robots that stay at sea for months
Online Oceans builds Scout, a 2.4 m solar-electric robot boat that collects ocean data for months at a time. No ship. No crew. One person launches it from a beach. Tether, our web platform, runs the fleet from any browser.
Survey companies, instrument makers and research programmes use Scout to watch the sea, listen for vessels and marine mammals, and measure waves and weather. We are a small, venture-backed team in Southampton, growing fast.
The job
Tether is the browser-based mission control that runs our Scout fleet, and through Tether Bridge it also runs other builders' vehicles. Data arrives over Iridium and Starlink, from position reports of a few bytes to live video and acoustic streams. You will build the APIs and services that take it in, store it and serve it to operators in real time, securely, because customers' data is often sensitive. Tether is offered from our cloud, as a white-label product under a customer's own brand, and on-prem on air-gapped networks, so the backend has to work in all three.
What you will do
- Design and build APIs and services in Python and FastAPI.
- Ingest telemetry and sensor data arriving over Iridium and Starlink, and serve it to operators live.
- Run the platform on AWS with infrastructure as code, monitoring, security and cost control.
- Build data APIs that deliver each customer's telemetry and sensor data to their own dashboards and cloud.
- Bring in external feeds such as AIS, weather, tides and bathymetric charts for the operating picture.
- Support all three ways Tether is deployed: our cloud, white label and on-prem, including air-gapped networks.
- Scale the platform from dozens of vehicles to thousands, working closely with the front-end and on-board software engineers.
What you will bring
- 10+ years building backend systems in production.
- Expert Python and FastAPI.
- Production AWS.
- Databases at scale, including time-series data.
- Live data systems, including streaming, queues and WebSockets.
- Multi-user, multi-tenant systems where each customer sees only their own fleet and data.
Nice to have
- Geospatial data.
- MAVLink, IoT or vehicle telemetry.
- Secure systems, including on-prem or air-gapped deployments.
Why join
- Data from real missions Your services will carry live positions, depths and headings from underwater vehicles tracked by Scout, and wave and wind data from missions such as 40 days on station with Sofar Ocean sensors.
- Swarms at sea Tether tasks groups of vehicles as one with its Picket, Convoy and Cover behaviours, and the backend keeps that picture live for every operator.
- A product other builders use Through Tether Bridge, other companies' USVs run on the same software as our own fleet, so the APIs you build serve a growing set of vehicles and customers.
- Shape the architecture We are a small team, so you will have a large say in how Tether's backend is designed and run as it grows.
How to apply
Email your CV to hello@onlineoceans.com with "Software Engineer (Backend)" in the subject line. Add a few lines on what you have built and why the ocean matters to you.
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