Software Developer - Models

Description

Mission (Why this role exists)

The Global Economic Model (GEM) is at the heart of Oxford Economics' offering: a fully integrated model covering 85 countries and major trading blocs, used by our economists and clients to forecast and test scenarios on everything from oil price shocks to shifts in global growth. Clients use it across our web, API, and desktop applications, and the way they want to build and explore scenarios is evolving. We're investing in the product to support that, including bringing AI into how scenarios are created, while continuing to provide a reliable, trusted modelling experience.

Our Models team is seeking an experienced, hands-on engineer to add depth and resilience to a small team that looks after a broad, high-value portfolio: the GEM across web, API, and desktop, its supporting tools, and associated parts of our product suite. Most recently, the team has been bringing natural-language scenario generation to the GEM, transforming how our clients can take advantage of this powerful tool. This role exists to give the team sustainable capacity - more room to innovate and improve the product.

This is a mid-level role for an engineer who already writes great software and is ready to make a meaningful contribution to a complex production product. You'll work closely with the whole team, contributing to features and technical decisions, and helping shape how the team works. You'll work with engineers, economists, product owners, and stakeholders across the business, and we'll back you to grow into a trusted member of the team.

Key Responsibilities

What you'll do

You'll spend most of your time on the GEM and its applications, while contributing across the team's wider portfolio as business needs evolve. Day to day you will:

Build

• Design, build, and ship improvements to the GEM's web, API, and desktop applications, and the tools that support scenario building, management, and presentation.
• Contribute to the team's AI work, including the scenario generator, helping take it from MVP towards a dependable part of the product.
• Develop features collaboratively end-to-end, from discovery and design through coding, testing, CI/CD, observability, and safe rollout.
• Apply solid engineering fundamentals: clean code, testing, modularity, performance, and security. Economists and clients rely on the GEM's numbers being right, every time.

Bonus points

• Experience with economic, financial, or scientific modelling software, or other computationally intensive applications.
• Experience building and maintaining .NET desktop applications alongside web products.
• Experience designing and supporting public APIs or CLI tools used by external clients.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-based features, including evaluation and traceability of AI-generated outputs.
• Experience using agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex) to ship real software.
• An interest in economics, forecasting, financial services, or research-led businesses.
• A degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Economics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

What success looks like

Here's the trajectory we'd hope to see:

In your first 3 months

• You're set up and contributing. You've shipped your first changes into production, with support from the team.
• You understand how the product fits together across web, API, and desktop, how baseline forecast releases flow through to clients, and where the main sources of operational load and delivery friction lie.

By 6 months

• You're shipping regularly and driving features forward. Taking the lead in pairing and mobbing sessions and contributing to technical design.
• You're a dependable contributor to the team's core work and are part of the team's operational support, handling issues with confidence.

By 12 months

• You're a go-to person for one or more areas of the product, and the team's knowledge and operational load are noticeably more evenly shared.
• You've made a meaningful contribution to a significant product improvement, such as bringing AI-driven scenario generation to clients, helping the product evolve.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

What you bring

We care more about how you approach engineering than a tick-box list. If you match most of what's below and are excited about contributing to a business-critical product, we'd like to hear from you.

Core engineering

• Around 3+ years of professional experience building, shipping, and supporting production software in a modern cloud environment.
• Strong proficiency in C#/.NET, comfortable working across APIs, services, and user interfaces; experience with TypeScript is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with SQL and relational databases (e.g. SQL Server), including an understanding of query performance.
• Experience with cloud services (ideally Azure) and modern delivery practices such as CI/CD and trunk-based development.
• Experience supporting systems in production: monitoring, troubleshooting, and fixing root causes rather than patching symptoms.

Job Benefits

Here are some of the benefits we offer in the UK to ensure you feel valued, supported, and thrive at work:

• Private Healthcare
• Employee Assistance Program
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Workplace Nursery Scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Hybrid/Flexible Working
• Team Gatherings and Connection Boost!

Software Developer - Models

Department: IT

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London, UK

Collaborate

• Work with the whole team to turn business needs into well-scoped, valuable increments, bringing your own view on design and trade-offs.
• Work closely with economists to understand how the model and its users work, and let that shape what you build.

Operate

• Take a share of operational responsibility: supporting the regular baseline forecast releases, monitoring product health, responding to and learning from incidents, and following issues through to durable fixes.
• Help reduce operational load and delivery friction by improving automation, testing, tooling, and documentation.
• Spread knowledge across the team so that understanding of critical systems is shared, and no area depends on a single person.

Learn

• Make effective, responsible use of AI-assisted development tools, and help the team build practical, evidence-based habits around them.
• Share what you learn through pairing, code review, and documentation.

Product & domain

• Experience contributing to features or components of a larger system end-to-end, and making sound design decisions within it.
• Comfort working with numerical and time-series data, with care for accuracy, precision, and performance.
• Experience working with structured data formats and file-based integrations (e.g. Excel import and export), and keeping them robust as they evolve.
• Interest in building with LLMs, such as prompting, tool calling, structured outputs, and evaluation, and in making AI features trustworthy and explainable.

How you work

• Ownership: you take responsibility for outcomes, not just tickets, and follow problems through until they're properly fixed
• Valuing good engineering practices: you practise, or want to deepen, XP-style ways of working such as pairing, TDD, refactoring, simple design, and frequent releases.
• Pragmatism: you balance product needs with maintainability and reliability, and have a good sense of when to be pragmatic versus principled.
• Customer empathy: you care about how the product behaves for economists and clients, and use that to guide your decisions.
• You communicate clearly, can explain trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers alike, and are generous with what you know.

Key working relationships

• Internal: The Models team, Software Engineers, Product Owners, Economists / Modelling and Consulting teams, the AI team, IT Operations.
• External: Clients using the GEM, cloud providers (Azure), frontier model providers, software/SaaS vendors.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)

Oxford Economics is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.