GoldFern
Platform Engineer - Government AI Unit
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Company Description
GoldFern is a specialist recruitment and executive search firm focused exclusively on the public sector and not-for-profit organizations in the UK. Founded by Maurice Goldstone and Lester Fernando, the firm draws on four decades of experience and a trusted, long-standing network of senior cross-industry professionals. GoldFern is known for placing leaders who drive complex transformations, build resilient functions, and take on high-impact roles in demanding environments. For candidates, this means a partner that understands the sector, values fit, and presents opportunities where their skills and experience genuinely belong. For client organizations, GoldFern provides honest guidance and direct access to the right talent for permanent, interim, and outcome-based roles.
About the role
We're building a small, fast-moving AI unit inside a major UK government department. Our AI products sit at the operational front line of public services: immigration and asylum decisions, border operations, public protection and frontline teams who handle sensitive information every day. Our principle is simple: AI should support human judgement, not replace it.
You'll build and run the platform that makes this possible. That means the Azure infrastructure, deployment tooling and shared services that let our product teams ship quickly and safely. This is a hands-on engineering role, and security, reliability and auditability are built in from the start.
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Our products are already used nationally by thousands of operational staff. Your job is to give them a platform that can grow with them: secure environments, dependable releases, good observability and infrastructure that copes with changing demand.
What you'll do
- Build and operate a shared Azure platform used by several AI product teams
- Own reusable Terraform modules that are tested, documented and versioned, so teams can adopt them safely
- Build reusable GitHub Actions workflows for infrastructure changes, container builds, deployments and security checks
- Automate onboarding for new apps and environments: federated identity, scoped permissions, GitHub environments and Terraform state
- Build security into the platform: managed identities, secrets, network controls and deployment approvals
- Lead on observability and production support across applications, infrastructure and pipelines
- Shape platform standards and help other engineers grow
What we're looking for
You'll need real, hands-on depth in these areas, not just exposure:
- Azure in production. You've built and run production Azure estates (hosting, container registries, storage, databases) and been on the hook when things broke.
- Terraform at scale. You've written reusable modules others depend on, and you're comfortable with remote state, multiple environments and making safe changes to live infrastructure.
- CI/CD, ideally GitHub Actions. You've built reusable workflows, container build pipelines and gated deployments.
- Kubernetes (AKS, Helm). You've run containerised services in production, not just deployed them.
- Cloud security and networking. You know RBAC, managed identities, OIDC and secrets management, plus VNets, private endpoints and DNS, and you can fix connectivity problems yourself.
- You'll also be able to explain technical trade-offs clearly and take ownership of delivery.
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Nice to have
- Azure OpenAI, AI Foundry or speech services in production (quotas, performance, cost)
- AI observability tooling such as Langfuse
- Supply chain security: dependency automation, vulnerability scanning, secret detection
- Event-driven workloads (Service Bus, Event Grid)
- Experience in regulated, security-cleared or high-consequence environments
- Mentoring engineers or driving adoption of shared tooling
Why join
Few platform roles carry this much consequence. Your systems will support operational staff who help keep the UK's borders secure and the public safe, and whose decisions affect people's safety and lives. You'll get the pace of a start-up, the scale of national government and the chance to set how responsible AI gets built across the department.
Civil Service Grade 6. Security clearance required. Hybrid working. Day rate c£600 per day, inside IR35. Remote work possible.
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