Lead Full Stack Engineer
6 days ago
Edinburgh
Lead Full Stack Engineer| Edinburgh (Hybrid) | Permanent | £65,000 - £75,000 per annum A GovTech scale-up delivering a live licensing platform for the Scottish public sector is hiring a Lead Full Stack Engineer to take technical ownership across their Laravel, InertiaJS and NextJS stack. This is a hands-on technical leadership role - you'll be writing code, making architecture calls, and setting the standard for a small, senior engineering team, while reporting directly into the CTO. You'll take ownership across the full stack: Laravel migrations and Eloquent models, InertiaJS admin interfaces, a NextJS citizen-facing portal, and an embeddable public register. You'll work from spec through to PR, security review, UAT and government release sign-off - and you'll be the technical reference point the rest of the team looks to. This is not a role hidden behind tickets. You'll be expected to make judgement calls, ask the right questions early, and hold the line on correctness and accessibility as much as delivery speed. • Own technical delivery of licensing workflows end-to-end, from architecture through to production, • Lead integration work with government services (OAuth2/OIDC, PKCE-based identity verification, notification and payment platforms, Companies House, DVLA, address lookup APIs), • Set and maintain engineering standards across a strongly-typed Laravel codebase (high type coverage, static analysis, refactoring discipline), • Guide the team's approach to accessible React UI built against a government design system, • Lead serverless cloud deployment and operational decision-making, • Drive security design reviews, threat modelling and SAST/DAST/SCA remediation, • Own the technical approach to onboarding new verticals on a config-driven platform, • Shape and build AI-assisted features (form validation, document/eligibility checks, triage tooling), • Mentor engineers, review code and PRs, and act as a technical escalation point, • 5+ years' commercial full stack development experience, backend and frontend, • Track record of technical leadership - architecture decisions, mentoring, driving engineering standards, • PHP 8.3+ (constructor property promotion, readonly properties, enums, strict types), • Laravel 11+ (or strong Symfony experience), InertiaJS or strong React, • Pest or PHPUnit - feature, unit and browser testing, • PostgreSQL - migrations, indexing, complex queries, • Experience with queues and background jobs (SQS/Redis, idempotent job design, dead-letter handling), • NextJS 14+ (App Router), React 18+, TypeScript, • Tailwind CSS, SWR or React Query, • Accessibility experience - WCAG 2.2 AA, keyboard navigation, screen-reader testing, • Strong Git workflow, comfortable in a regulated SDLC (code review, security sign-off, audit trails), • Clear written communication for technical documentation and stakeholder-facing decision records, • Serverless Laravel hosting, AWS serverless stack experience, • Managed NextJS hosting, application observability tooling (e.g. Sentry), • Cypress or Playwright, MSW for E2E mocking, • RBAC and multi-tenant, team-scoped data patterns, • GitHub Actions CI/CD, SAST/DAST tooling, • Background in a regulated sector - gov-tech, fintech or healthtech, • Prior experience leading or mentoring within an engineering team, • £65,000 - £75,000 per annum, • 30 days holiday plus your birthday off, • Hybrid working (2 days office, 3 flexible), • Enhanced maternity/paternity leave, • Company pension with employer contributions from day one, • Conference and training budget plus equipment allowance, • Modern, well-maintained codebase (Laravel 12, React 19, TypeScript, PHPStan, Pest 4, Rector), • Introductory call (30 minutes), • Technical assessment (40 minutes - 1 hour), • Face-to-face final interview in Edinburgh This role sits within a regulated environment delivering services on behalf of a public sector body. Candidates must have the right to work in the UK and be willing to complete standard pre-employment background screening. Key Skills: Full Stack Engineer, Lead Engineer, Laravel, PHP, React, NextJS, TypeScript, InertiaJS, PostgreSQL, Tailwind CSS, Technical Lead, GovTech, Edinburgh #J-18808-Ljbffr