Applications for this position close on 26th July at 23:59 UK Time

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.

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.

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.

What we offer

Career-defining projects with outsized impact

• Backing from the Prime Minister and No10 to scope and build transformative AI projects. 
• Unique opportunities to apply technology that could transform the public sector and impact citizens’ lives.
• Talented, supportive and mission-driven colleagues.

Resources & access

• Access to frontier models and ample compute.
• Extensive operational, product, strategy, design and delivery support so you can focus on shipping.
• Work with experts across national security, policy, AI research and adjacent sciences.

Growth & empowerment

• A team culture and development support that prioritises personal growth.
• Opportunities to own important products early and develop them in small empowered teams.
• 5 days off learning and development, annual stipends for learning and development and funding for conferences and external collaborations.

Life & family*

• Opportunity to work from London, Manchester or Bristol offices.
• Hybrid working, flexibility for occasional remote work abroad and stipends for work-from-home equipment.
• Generous annual leave - 25 days plus one additional day for each year of service
• Generous paid parental leave (up to 39 weeks full pay + option for additional unpaid time).
• On top of your salary, we contribute 28.97% of your base salary to your pension.
• Discounts and benefits for cycling to work, dental insurance, donations and retail/gyms.

*These benefits apply to direct employees. Benefits may differ for people joining through other employment arrangements such as secondments.

Salary

Salary is paid within the grade range shown below.
As this is a GDAD role, the maximum salary includes a non-pensionable technical allowance, and successful candidates will be appointed somewhere within that range depending on assessment.

Grade 6
National: £69,675 to £82,318 (maximum includes £12,643 non-pensionable allowance)
London: £74,605 to £90,756 (maximum includes £16,151 non-pensionable allowance)

Selection Process

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

Diversity and Inclusion