i.AI
Lead Full Stack Engineer
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About the job
The Incubator for AI (i.AI) is a high-agency technical unit within the UK government, building and shipping frontier AI systems that materially change how government works. We combine startup pace with national-scale impact, guided by three principles.
Talent: we work with some of the best researchers, engineers and product people in government and beyond.
Innovation: we move at startup speed inside one of the world's largest organisations.
Impact: we apply AI for the public good across health, planning, education, and the work of government itself.
We are based in London, Bristol and Manchester, with hybrid working.
Full Stack engineers at i.AI
Full Stack engineers at i.AI build the products and services that bring our AI capabilities to users: the interfaces, APIs, data layers, infrastructure and delivery pipelines that make AI safe, reliable and useful for citizens and civil servants.
Our stack includes Python (Django, FastAPI), TypeScript, modern JS frameworks (React, Astro, Svelte), PostgreSQL, AWS and Terraform. We integrate frontier LLMs through providers and tooling such as Amazon Bedrock, and the AI-integration landscape evolves as the ecosystem matures. You will work in small cross-disciplinary teams alongside Applied AI Engineers, User Researchers, Designers and Product Managers.
Job summary
We build a portfolio of AI products at different stages of maturity, from early discovery through to services running at scale. As a Lead Engineer you will be the technical leader for one of these product teams, working in partnership with a Product Manager to set the team’s direction, define delivery goals, and make sure the engineering work connects to outcomes.
You will coordinate a small group of engineers, own architectural decisions, and set the standard for how the team works. Over time you may move between products as priorities shift, giving you breadth across different problem domains.
Job description
Role responsibilities:
- Partner with the Product Manager to shape the strategic direction of your product, translating organisational goals into delivery objectives and OKRs for the team.
- Own the technical architecture of your product, making final decisions on approach while bringing engineers along with the reasoning.
- Coordinate and prioritise engineering work across your team, balancing delivery pace with technical quality and sustainability.
- Develop a deep understanding of the problem space, participating in discovery, interrogating assumptions, and aligning on what success looks like.
- Create an environment where engineers do their best work through clear expectations, regular feedback, and support for growth.
- Maintain high engineering standards across the team through code review, testing practices, and operational discipline.
- Represent engineering in cross-team and leadership conversations, communicating technical trade-offs and risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
- Still write code, particularly on the hardest problems or where architectural decisions need to be validated through implementation.
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Person specification:
We’d love to hear from you if you have:
- Experience leading the technical direction of a product or team, including making architectural decisions and owning the consequences.
- A track record of working closely with product managers or equivalent roles to define goals, shape roadmaps, and connect engineering work to outcomes.
- Experience coordinating and growing engineers. You set clear expectations, give useful feedback, and create the conditions for others to do great work.
- Strong technical depth across the stack, with the judgement to know when to go deep and when to delegate.
- Clear communication with both technical and non-technical audiences. You can explain trade-offs, articulate risk, and build confidence in your direction.
Experience of the following would be beneficial:
- Leading engineering in early-stage or greenfield products where the problem space is still being defined.
- Familiarity with our tech stack or similar technologies (e.g., Python, TypeScript, React, Svelte, PostgreSQL, AWS, Terraform).
- Experience building products that integrate AI capabilities, and an understanding of the engineering challenges that come with that.
- Setting up engineering practices, processes or culture in a team or organisation from scratch.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Changing and improving
- Communicating and influencing
- Delivering at pace
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.
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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
- Base salary of £74,605-82,860 for London or £69,675-78,035 for national, plus a skills-related allowance of up to £22,600
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
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 and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. 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.
Salary
£69,675—£90,756 GBP
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