AI Engineering Lead - .NET etc at Goaco, United Kingdom, 3 Months, £Contract Rate

Engagement: 3 month contract

Vetting: BPSS minimum

Tech: .NET 10 | AWS & Terraform | Azure AI Foundry | Governance & assurance

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for an AI Engineering Lead to own the technical side of governance and

assurance, and the architecture, infrastructure and delivery of an AI-enabled service estate

used in UK central government.

You will take the service through TDA, service assessment, Secure by Design and DPIA, and defend its

design in front of technical boards and the SIRO/DPO. You will also lead the development team day to day and set the engineering standard.

The estate is a .NET 10 hub application plus four tool services, running on AWS with AI capabilities

delivered through Azure AI Foundry.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Governance and assurance

• TDA and assurance gates: Own the technical side of client governance: TDA, service assessment, Secure by Design and DPIA. Produce and maintain the TDA submission and supporting architecture documentation.
• Boards and SIRO/DPO: Defend architecture, AI design, data residency and cost decisions in front of technical boards and the SIRO/DPO.
• Security evidence: Own security evidence, including pen testing, remediation, controls and compliance scoring.
• Risk: Maintain the RAID log and escalate risks early.
• Stakeholders: Work directly with commercial, policy, security and information assurance functions, as well as service owners, and explain technical trade-offs in plain English.

Engineering

• Technical direction: Own the architecture of the .NET 10 service estate and protect the core design rules: each tool runs as its own service, and each organisation's data stays isolated.
• Infrastructure: Own the cloud estate, all managed in Terraform. That's ECS, Aurora PostgreSQL, load balancing, WAF and S3 on AWS, plus AI Foundry and Application Insights on Azure. Keep environments consistent, secure and within budget.
• Delivery: Own CI/CD and releases across dev, integration and pilot environments, including database migrations and environment configuration.
• Observability and operations: Make sure live services can be seen and supported through monitoring, alerting, incident triage and cost tracking.
• Engineering standards: Set and enforce test-first development, strict builds, documentation kept in step with code, and disciplined code review.
• AI-assisted delivery: Use Claude Code day to day to build, review, debug and investigate live issues. Set how the team uses it so every change stays tested, reviewed and owned by the developer.
• AI integration: Make sound trade-offs on how the services use Azure AI Foundry, including guardrails, cost, rate limits, evaluation and human-in-the-loop.
• Requirements: Turn business needs into clear requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria. Shape and prioritise the backlog with product leads.
• Team leadership: Lead the developers day to day and remove blockers to delivery.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

UK public sector experience (essential)

• Delivered technology in UK central government through governance and assurance gates
• Worked with commercial, policy, security and information assurance functions, not just digital teams
• Understand the AI Playbook, Service Standard, Technology Code of Practice and Secure by Design well enough to design to them
• Right to work in the UK; BPSS as a minimum and willing to go higher

Engineering

• Proven Lead or Principal Engineer who has led a development team day to day
• Strong C# and modern .NET, service-based architecture and multi-tenant isolation
• Production LLM integration (Azure AI Foundry or equivalent), covering guardrails, cost, rate limits, evaluation and human-in-the-loop
• Terraform on AWS (ECS, Aurora, WAF, S3) plus working knowledge of Azure
• CI/CD, releases and database migrations across environments
• Daily Claude Code use, with a practice for keeping AI-generated code tested and reviewed
• Sets engineering standards and owns observability and operations
• Writes requirements and acceptance criteria, and presents clearly to senior non-technical stakeholders

DESIRABLE

• Cloud cost management and charge-back
• AI assurance: measuring accuracy, bias and hallucination

WORKING ARRANGEMENTS

• Remote within the UK, with occasional travel
• Contract