Lead Cloud Platform Engineer- i.AI

Job summary

Incubator for AI, i.AI

Help build the platform behind some of the most ambitious AI products in government

This is not a conventional platform engineering role.

At i.AI, you will help build the cloud platform that enables teams to deliver frontier AI products into real world public services. Your work will shape the foundations that allow AI systems to move from idea to production securely, reliably and at pace.

You will join a highly capable engineering team with a flat structure, strong technical standards and a high degree of autonomy. This is an environment for engineers who want to solve hard problems, influence architecture, improve how teams build, and work on technology that has visible impact beyond the organisation itself.

If you are excited by platform engineering, modern cloud infrastructure, AI enabled systems and the challenge of making advanced technology work in the real world, this is a rare opportunity to do all of that in one role.

Job description

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Cloud Platform Engineer to help design, build and operate the platform that powers AI product delivery.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who combines deep cloud platform expertise with broad strength across architecture, security, software engineering and AI platform concerns. You will operate as a T shaped engineer, bringing both technical depth and the judgement to work across disciplines when needed.

You will play a central role in defining how platform capabilities are built, adopted and evolved. You will lead through technical credibility, not hierarchy, helping teams solve complex problems while raising the bar for engineering quality across the platform.

What you will work on

• End to end platform engineering: You will own the technical delivery of platform initiatives from concept through to production. That means taking ambiguous problems, making clear architectural decisions, and building secure, scalable cloud components that teams can depend on.
• Platform as a product: You will work backwards from user needs to build technical capabilities that improve the developer experience. You will create reusable patterns for local development, pipelines, environments, observability and operational ergonomics, helping teams ship faster with less friction.
• AI workload enablement: You will support the delivery of production AI systems and agentic workloads. You will build and maintain platform capabilities for model access, routing, tracing, evaluation, reliability and cost control.
• Intelligent automation and security: You will treat security as a first class engineering concern, building automated controls for software supply chain security, secrets management and policy as code. You will also actively use GenAI capabilities to reduce operational toil, introduce intelligent guardrails and streamline developer workflows.
• Technical leadership: You will help shape platform direction through strong engineering judgement and hands on delivery. You will mentor other engineers, introduce better patterns and balance the needs of individual teams with platform wide coherence.
  

Why join i.AI

This is a chance to work on platform engineering at a point where cloud, software delivery and AI are converging fast.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Build for real production AI use cases rather than isolated experiments
• Work with frontier models and modern AI tooling as part of day to day engineering
• Solve platform problems that span reliability, developer experience, security and AI enablement
• Influence architecture and technical standards in a high trust, high agency team
• Contribute to products with meaningful real world impact

For the right engineer, this role offers a combination that is hard to find elsewhere: complex platform work, genuine technical ownership, access to advanced AI tooling, and the chance to help shape how ambitious AI products are delivered in practice.

Our stack

You do not need to be an expert in every tool from day one, but our technical ecosystem includes:

• Cloud infrastructure: AWS including ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, RDS and S3, alongside multi cloud integration patterns across Azure and GCP.
• Containerisation and delivery: Docker and podman, container orchestration, GitHub Actions for CI and CD, infrastructure automation, and robust deployment patterns including rolling, canary and blue green.
• Development: Terraform, Python with FastAPI, and JavaScript or TypeScript with Next.js, Astro and Node.js.AI platform layer: Tooling for model routing, tracing and evaluation, such as LiteLLM and Langfuse, integrated with modern AI frameworks including LangGraph, DSPy and Inspect.
• AI harness: OpenCode and Claude Code, with full access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for both developer augmentation and platform integration.
• Observability: AWS CloudWatch for logs, metrics and alarms, alongside Grafana, Sentry and X Ray for monitoring and tracing.
• Security: Supply chain tooling including SAST, SCA and SBOMs, policy as code, runtime assurance including CSPM and DAST, and automated IAM and secrets management.

Person specification

Who we think will thrive in this role

We are looking for an experienced lead level engineer who is energised by building platforms that matter.

You may be a strong fit if you bring some of the following:

• Strong hands on experience building and operating cloud platforms in production, with AWS strongly preferred
• Deep understanding of platform architecture, distributed systems design, networking fundamentals and reliability concepts such as SLOs, tracing and alerting
• A mindset for applying AI internally, with experience or strong interest in using GenAI and LLM assisted tooling to reduce repetitive operational work and improve platform resilience
• Practical experience embedding security into delivery workflows, including software supply chain security, IAM, threat modelling and policy as code
• Experience supporting AI or ML systems in production, including model serving, MLOps, agentic orchestration, or prompt and inference cost trade offs
• Practical proficiency in software development and strong capability in infrastructure automation
• A track record of defining reusable patterns and evolving engineering standards, rather than simply delivering one off solutions
• Strong ownership, sound judgement and comfort working through ambiguity
• A product mindset, with a clear understanding that developer experience is critical to platform adoption
• The ability to coach others, raise technical standards through practice, and operate effectively in a flat, high agency team

Bonus experience includes multi cloud patterns, GPU or HPC workloads, or building platform telemetry and internal tools.

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Candidates will assessed technically via interview and potentially take home assessment. Details of this will be communicated to the candidate directly.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £69,675, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £20,184 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Experience and Technical skills.

Appointment is conditional on successfully completing UK Government SC clearance. Prior clearance is not required—we will sponsor and support you. You should normally have been resident in the UK for 2 of the past 5 years. Employment is conditional on obtaining and maintaining the required clearance(s). More detail on clearance eligibility can be found on the UK Government website: National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK

In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all elements of the selection process.

Candidates should expect to go through some or all of the following stages once an application has been submitted:

• A short initial conversation
• Technical take home test
• Second interview in which we’ll review the technical test
• Third interview with wider representation from the team
• Final interview with members of the senior team

To apply please follow the instructions on Greenhouse where you will be asked to complete personal statement questions and upload your CV. Should the team receive an abundance of CVs we reserve the right to sift on CV alone.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window). As part of the application process, we monitor statistics on D&I. You can see how we process this data here: Recruitment privacy notice - GOV.UK.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Ben Sams
• Email : ben.sams@dsit.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : ben.sams@dsit.gov.uk

Further information

Appointment to the Civil Service is governed by the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel that your application has not been treated in accordance with the recruitment principles, and wish to make a complaint, then you should contact in the first instance dsitresourcing.GRS@cabinetoffice.gov.uk. If you are not satisfied with the response that you receive, then you can contact the Civil Service Commission. For further information on bringing a complaint to the Civil Service Commission please visit their web pages at: https://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/contact-us/

Attachments

DSIT T&Cs v1.2 Opens in new window (docx, 179kB)