Engineering Lead - AI, Cloud & National Security

Forward Role
Gloucester, United Kingdom
Today
£120,000 – £130,000 pa

Salary

£120,000 – £130,000 pa

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

Benefits

DV bonus Excellent package
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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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