Lead Full Stack Engineer- i.AI

Job summary

About the job

The Incubator for AI (i.AI) builds AI products inside the UK government that change how public services work across education, health, planning, and parliament. Small teams, start-up pace, national-scale impact. We are based in London, Bristol and Manchester, with hybrid working.

Full Stack Engineers build the products and services that bring AI capabilities to users: 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 such as Amazon Bedrock, and the AI-integration landscape evolves as the ecosystem matures.

Job summary

We build a portfolio of AI products at different stages of maturity, from early discovery through to services running at scale. You will be part of a small cross-disciplinary team working on one of these products, owning problems end-to-end and shipping real improvements for users. Over time you may move between products as priorities shift, giving you breadth across different problem domains and technologies. We’re looking for engineers who care as much about understanding the problem as writing the code, and who thrive when working closely with people from different disciplines.

Job description

Job description

What you'll do

• 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.

Person specification

Who you are

• 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.

You don't need to meet every criterion to apply. If this role excites you, we'd love to hear from you.

What we offer

Career-defining projects with outsized impact

• Backing from the Prime Minister and No10 to scope and build transformative AI products.
• Unique opportunities to apply technology to transform the public sector and citizens' lives.
• Talented, supportive and mission-driven colleagues.

Resources & access

• Access to frontier models and ample compute.
• 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.

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.

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Technical take home testSecond interview in which we’ll review the technical testDetails of this will be given to candidates ahead of time.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £69,675, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £20,184 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.
• A hybrid office/home based working model where staff will spend a norm of 40-60% of their time in the office (minimum of 40%) over a month with flex dependent on balancing business and individual need.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Experience and Technical skills.

Selection