Senior Platform Engineer - UK Government AI Unit

Goldfern is recruiting a hands-on Platform Engineer for a small, fast-moving AI unit inside a major UK government department. Its AI products sit at the operational front line of public services, supporting casework, decision support and frontline teams who handle sensitive information every day. The principle is simple: AI should support human judgement, not replace it.
You'll build and run the platform that makes this possible: the Azure infrastructure, deployment tooling and shared services that let product teams ship quickly and safely, with security, reliability and auditability built in from the start. The products are already used nationally by thousands of operational staff, so the platform has to scale with them.
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
• Support the full infrastructure lifecycle: upgrades, migrations, backup and recovery
• Shape platform standards and help other engineers grow
What we're looking for
This is a hands-on role. You need real depth that you've built and run yourself. Designing, overseeing or advising isn't enough on its own.
• 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: reusable modules others depend on, remote state, multiple environments and safe changes to live infrastructure
• CI/CD, ideally GitHub Actions: reusable workflows, container build pipelines and gated deployments
• Kubernetes (AKS, Helm): containerised services you've run in production, including cluster upgrades
• Cloud security and networking: RBAC, managed identities, OIDC and secrets management, plus VNets, private endpoints and DNS, and you can fix connectivity problems yourself
• Production incident experience: diagnosing failures using logs, metrics, traces and alerting, and finding the root cause yourself
• Clear communication of technical trade-offs and personal ownership of delivery
Desirable:
• 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
The practicalities
• Contract, day rate, inside IR35 via an umbrella company
• Largely remote
• BPSS required before starting. You must be eligible for SC, which needs around five years' UK residence. Holding SC already is preferred
• Start: as soon as possible
• You must be based in the UK with the existing right to work here. Applications from candidates based overseas will not be considered
This search is being run exclusively through Goldfern. If this sounds like you, or someone in your network, get in touch with Lester Fernando for a confidential conversation. I'm happy to share fuller detail once we've spoken.
lester@goldfern.co.uk

Work arrangement
Yes