A Hampshire engineering and research company, part of the Chemring group, working on sensing, communications, navigation, AI and counter-drone technology.
Roke, formally Roke Manor Research, is an engineering and research company that designs sensors, communications and data systems, mainly for defence and national security customers. Its research covers electronic sensors, communications, artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. It has also produced navigation systems that work without GPS, an electromagnetic warfare range, and CORTEXA Guardian, a counter-drone system, which links it to the autonomous systems world even though it does not mainly build robots.
The company was founded by Plessey in 1956 as a research site, with Harold Finden as its first managing director. It was later owned by GEC and Siemens, then by Siemens alone from 1991, and has been owned by the Chemring Group since 2010. Early work included gallium arsenide microwave research and the HALO artillery-detection system, and early vision work that fed into the Hawk-Eye ball-tracking system. We could not find a mission statement in the pages we read, so we have not written one.
Roke's headquarters is Roke Manor near Romsey in Hampshire. According to a 2025 summary it also has offices in Gloucester, Woking and Manchester. In 2023 it bought a geospatial intelligence firm called Geollect, and a 2023 British Army contract under Project ZODIAC and a 2025 missile defence research contract under Project STORM have been reported. The managing director is Marc Overton, with Ian Cooper as finance director. ACQUIRED: by Chemring (2010); it still operates under the Roke name.
The company had 828 employees in 2022 according to the same source. We found no pages on culture, so we make no claims about what working there is like. The mix of locations and of work, from sensors to data science, suggests teams of specialists who work on long, difficult technical problems with government customers. Much of the work is for defence customers, so some roles may involve security clearance, though we did not verify that.
Roles in a research company like this include radio-frequency and electronics engineers, signal-processing mathematicians, software developers, AI and data scientists, systems engineers, test engineers, and project and commercial staff. If you like physics, maths or computing and want to see them applied to real problems, this is an example of a UK employer in that space. Note that its link to drones and robotics is through autonomy and counter-drone work, so it sits at the edge of this sector.
Website: www.roke.co.uk
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