Overview
Lead Cloud Platform Engineer role at i.AI (Incubator for AI) to help design, build and operate the cloud platform that powers AI product delivery. This is a hands-on technical leadership position focused on modern cloud infrastructure, security, and scalable platform capabilities to enable production AI systems in government contexts. The role offers high autonomy within a flat engineering structure and opportunities to shape platform direction with strong engineering judgement.
Responsibilities
- End to end platform engineering: own the technical delivery of platform initiatives from concept through to production, making architectural decisions and building secure, scalable cloud components that teams can depend on.
- Platform as a product: design capabilities that improve the developer experience, creating reusable patterns for local development, pipelines, environments, observability, and operational ergonomics to accelerate shipping with less friction.
- AI workload enablement: support production AI systems and agentic workloads; build and maintain platform capabilities for model access, routing, tracing, evaluation, reliability, and cost control.
- Intelligent automation and security: treat security as a first-class concern with automated controls for software supply chain security, secrets management and policy as code; use GenAI to reduce operational toil, introduce intelligent guardrails, and streamline developer workflows.
- Technical leadership: shape platform direction through engineering judgement and hands-on delivery, mentor engineers, promote better patterns, and balance needs of individual teams with platform-wide coherence.
What you will thrive on
- Strong hands-on experience building and operating production cloud platforms, with AWS preferred.
- Deep understanding of platform architecture, distributed systems, networking, and reliability concepts (SLOs, tracing, alerting).
- Interest in applying GenAI/LLM tooling to reduce operational work and improve resilience.
- Experience embedding security into delivery workflows, including software supply chain security, IAM, threat modelling, and policy as code.
- Experience supporting AI/ML systems in production (model serving, MLOps, agentic orchestration, or prompt/inference cost trade-offs).
- Proficiency in software development and infrastructure automation; track record of reusable patterns and engineering standards.
- Strong ownership, judgement, and ability to operate in a flat, high-agency team; product mindset with emphasis on developer experience.
- Ability to coach others and raise technical standards.
What we offer
- Career-defining projects with outsized impact and opportunities to apply technology to transform the public sector.
- Access to frontier models, compute resources, and a supportive, mission-driven team.
- Growth and empowerment: learning and development 5 days off, annual stipends, conference funding, and opportunities to own important products early.
- Life and family benefits: hybrid working in London, Manchester, or Bristol with occasional remote work abroad, generous leave, parental leave, and pension contributions.
Our stack
- Cloud infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Lambda, CloudFront, RDS, S3) with multi-cloud patterns across Azure and GCP.
- Containerisation and delivery: Docker, container orchestration, GitHub Actions, and deployment patterns (rolling, canary, blue-green).
- Development: Terraform, Python with FastAPI, JavaScript/TypeScript with Next.js, Astro, Node.js.
- AI platform layer: tooling for model routing, tracing, evaluation (LiteLLM, Langfuse) with LangGraph, DSPy, Inspect.
- AI harness: OpenCode and Claude Code; access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.
- Observability: AWS CloudWatch, Grafana, Sentry, X Ray.
- Security: SAST, SCA, SBOMs, policy as code, CSPM, DAST, and automated IAM/secrets management.
Selection Process
- UK government clearance process with sponsorship if needed.
- Stages include a short initial conversation, technical take-home test, and multiple interviews with the team and senior representation.
- Diversity and Inclusion information and privacy notices are provided as part of the process.
Salary: £69,675 - £90,756 GBP (GDAD role, with position within the grade range and non-pensionable allowances as applicable).