Lead Full Stack Engineer

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.

The Role

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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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

Skills & Experience Required

• 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

Desirable

• 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

Salary & Benefits

• £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)

Interview Process

• Introductory call (30 minutes)
• Technical assessment (40 minutes - 1 hour)
• Face-to-face final interview in Edinburgh

Eligibility

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