Lead Cloud Platform Engineer, AI Platform

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Cloud infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Lambda, Cloud Front, RDS, S3) with multi-cloud patterns across Azure and GCP.
• Containerisation and delivery:
  Docker, container orchestration, Git Hub Actions, and deployment patterns (rolling, canary, blue-green).
• Development:
  Terraform, Python with FastAPI, JavaScript/Type Script with Next.js, Astro, Node.js.
• AI platform layer: tooling for model routing, tracing, evaluation (LiteLLM, Langfuse) with Lang Graph, DSPy, Inspect.
• AI harness:
  Open Code and Claude Code; access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.
• Observability: AWS Cloud Watch, Grafana, Sentry, X Ray.
• Security: SAST, SCA, SBOMs, policy as code, CSPM, DAST, and automated IAM/secrets management.

• 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).