Platform engineer Job Description

Our justice system faces serious challenges, from rising demand and staff shortages to siloed systems and inconsistent access. AI presents an opportunity to address these problems at scale. But this opportunity must be seized with care.

The Justice AI Unit is a small, fast-moving and innovative team. We build and ship products quickly across the Ministry of Justice. By embedding AI that enhances, not replaces, human judgement, we aim to deliver better outcomes, faster services, and greater fairness for all.

The Role

As a Platform Engineer, you will be responsible for building cloud infrastructure, architecting complex systems and developing scalable code. This is an essential role for the unit as we scale several products across the justice system. As a Platform Engineer, you will have an outsized impact on staff across probation, prisons, and courts. You’ll work closely with product teams, designers, and domain experts to ship reliable systems that improve outcomes for users- while ensuring performance, security, and maintainability.

We value curiosity, pragmatism, and the ability to work in ambiguity. If you don’t meet all of the experience below, don’t worry- we’re looking for people who can learn quickly on the job and adapt to a rapidly evolving landscape.

Essential Experience

• Experience building and managing production infrastructure on Azure

• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code

• Familiarity with modern web application stacks, especially Next.js, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL

• Solid understanding of containerisation, CI/CD pipelines and secure deployment practices

• Experience implementing logging, monitoring, and alerting for production systems

• Understanding of LLMOps concepts and patterns- e.g. orchestration of language model pipelines, caching, logging, prompt versioning

• Knowledge of security best practices in a cloud environment

Desirable Experience

• Experience deploying or managing large language models (e.g. OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Hugging Face) and managing cost, performance, and latency trade-offs

• Familiarity with MLOps tooling (e.g. MLflow, Weights & Biases) and deployment of ML/AI workloads

• Proficiency in scripting and automation using tools like Bash and Python

• Previous experience in fast-paced product teams or startup-style environments

What You'll Get

• The chance to shape the future of AI in justice, ensuring it's used safely, fairly and effectively

• A high-trust, low-ego working environment where delivery and mission come first

• Opportunities to grow your technical and leadership skills in a mission-driven team

• The ability to work flexibly and across different areas of the justice system