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Lead Full Stack Engineer
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Lead Full Stack Engineer
Edinburgh · Hybrid | Permanent | £70,000–£75,000
Take technical ownership of a live GovTech licensing platform used across Scotland's public sector — Laravel, Inertia/React and Next.js, shipping features that citizens and public bodies rely on every day.
About the role
We're looking for a Lead Full Stack Engineer to take technical ownership across the full stack: Laravel migrations and Eloquent models, Inertia/React admin pages, the Next.js citizen portal, and the embeddable public register. You'll work from spec through PR, security review, UAT and government release sign-off — and you'll set the standard for how the rest of the engineering team does the same.
This isn't a role hidden behind tickets. You'll take the judgment calls, ask the right questions early, and hold the line on correctness and accessibility as much as feature velocity. You'll report to the CTO, work closely with the Security Engineer, DevOps and the client-facing delivery manager, and act as the technical anchor for a small, senior engineering team — reviewing designs, unblocking tricky problems, and helping shape where the platform goes next.
What you'll do
- Own technical delivery of licensing workflows end to end, from architecture through to production.
- Lead integration work with government services: OAuth2/OIDC and PKCE-based identity verification, notification and payment platforms, Companies House, DVLA, and address lookup services.
- Set and maintain engineering standards across a strongly-typed Laravel codebase — type coverage, static analysis, and refactoring discipline.
- Guide the team's approach to accessible React UI, using Radix primitives and a government design system.
- Take the lead on serverless cloud deployment and operational decisions.
- Drive security design reviews, threat modelling, and SAST/DAST/SCA remediation.
- Own the technical approach to onboarding new verticals — the platform is config-driven, so new public bodies bring new form schemas, fee structures and workflows.
- Shape and build AI-assisted features — smarter form validation, document and eligibility checks, and tooling that helps enforcement teams triage applications faster — and help the wider team develop good judgement about where AI genuinely adds value.
- Mentor engineers, review code and PRs, and act as a technical escalation point.
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What we're looking for
- 5+ years of commercial full-stack experience, with a track record of technical leadership or informal seniority (architecture decisions, mentoring, driving standards).
- PHP 8.3+ with modern features (constructor property promotion, readonly, enums, strict types).
- Laravel 11+ (or strong Symfony experience you'd bring across), plus practical Inertia.js or strong React.
- Pest (or PHPUnit with willingness to convert) — feature, unit, and ideally browser tests.
- PostgreSQL — comfortable with migrations, indexing, and non-trivial queries.
- Experience with queues and background jobs — SQS/Redis-backed queues, idempotent job design, dead-letter handling.
- Next.js 14+ (App Router) with React 18+, and TypeScript (or strong JavaScript with willingness to adopt it).
- Tailwind CSS, and data fetching with SWR (or React Query with willingness to learn SWR).
- Accessibility expertise: WCAG 2.2 AA, keyboard navigation, screen-reader testing.
- Strong Git workflow and comfort working in a regulated SDLC — code review, security sign-off, audit trails.
- Clear written communication — you'll write PR descriptions, change requests and decision records that senior stakeholders read.
Nice to have
- Serverless Laravel hosting experience, AWS serverless stack (compute, managed PostgreSQL, queues, caching, CDN, secrets).
- Managed cloud hosting for Next.js applications.
- Error monitoring and observability tooling (e.g. Sentry).
- MSW for E2E mocking; Cypress or Playwright.
- RBAC and multi-tenant, team-scoped data patterns.
- GitHub Actions CI/CD; SAST/DAST tooling.
- Background in regulated environments — gov-tech, fintech, healthtech or similar.
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The process
- Online get-to-know-each-other call (30 min)
- Online technical assessment (40 min–1 hr)
- Face-to-face final interview in Edinburgh
What's on offer
- 30 days holiday, plus your birthday off.
- Hybrid working — two days a week in the office, three wherever you do your best work.
- Enhanced maternity/paternity leave for primary and secondary carers.
- Company pension with employer contributions from day one.
- Training and development budget, plus conference budget and equipment allowance.
- Regular company meet-ups — strategy days, team socials, the occasional pub quiz.
- Real impact — the infrastructure you build here runs live public services.
- A modern, well-maintained codebase (Laravel 12, React 19, TypeScript, PHPStan, Pest 4, Rector) — AI is embraced across the stack, but the team hires for judgement and craft first.
Eligibility: this role sits within a regulated environment delivering services on behalf of a Scottish public body. The successful candidate must have the right to work in the UK and be willing to complete standard pre-employment background screening (e.g. Baseline Personnel Security Standard or Disclosure Scotland checks, where required).
We're committed to building an inclusive team and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If you need any reasonable adjustments for the interview process, let us know and we'll make it work.
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