Engineering Lead - AI, Cloud & National Security

Forward Role
Gloucester, United Kingdom
3 weeks ago
£120,000 – £130,000 pa
Applications closed

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Salary

£120,000 – £130,000 pa

Job Type
Permanent
Work Location
Hybrid
Seniority
Lead
Education
Degree
Security Clearance
Required
Posted
30 Apr 2026 (3 weeks ago)

Benefits

DV bonus Excellent package

Our exciting client is seeking an Engineering Lead to build and lead small, high-performing Agile teams (4-8 engineers) delivering secure, scalable solutions within the UK National Security (NatSec) domain

Engineering Lead - AI, Cloud & National Security

Package- £110,000 - £120,000 + dv bonus + excellent package

Location - Cheltenham - Hybrid

Clearance - eDV Clearance Required

Overview

This is a hands-on leadership role combining architecture, software engineering, and team leadership, with a focus on Software, AI, data platforms, and cloud-native systems.

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor Agile engineering teams, driving high-quality, rapid delivery (DevSecOps)
  • Own solution architecture, designing for secure and constrained environments.
  • Lead the implementation of the "underpinning tech" for AI, including data pipelines.
  • Act as a trusted advisor to UK Government stakeholders.
  • Define technical roadmaps and support cloud transformation (AWS/Azure)

Core Skills

  • Background in UK National Security / Defence / Government.
  • Strong leadership experience in software engineering teams.
  • Proficiency in Python, Go, or Java (+ TypeScript/Node.js desirable)
  • Expertise in AWS or Azure, Terraform, and Kubernetes (EKS/AKS)
  • Strong grounding in SQL (Postgres) and NoSQL (MongoDB/DynamoDB)
  • Experience with CI/CD, microservices, TDD/BDD.
  • Knowledge of secure system design.

Desirable (AI & Data)

  • Vector DBs: Milvus, Weaviate, Pinecone
  • Data orchestration: Airflow, Prefect, Dagster
  • Search: ElasticSearch / OpenSearch
  • AI frameworks: LangChain, Hugging Face
  • MLOps: MLflow, Kubeflow

If you are looking for an opportunity to work on mission-critical systems at the forefront of UK National Security? Apply now or get in touch for a confidential conversation.

As an industry leading, nationwide Marketing, Digital, Analytics, IT and Design recruitment agency, we are continually receiving new assignments to work on, so keep a close eye on our website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages for a full list of current permanent and interim opportunities as well as marketplace news and fun stuff.
Forward Role is operating as an employment agency.

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