At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the development of a live licensing platform using Laravel, InertiaJS, and NextJS.
- Company: Join a GovTech scale-up making a difference in the Scottish public sector.
- Benefits: Enjoy a competitive salary, 30 days holiday, hybrid working, and a training budget.
- Other info: Mentor a talented team and work in a modern, well-maintained codebase.
- Why this job: Take technical ownership and shape innovative solutions that impact the community.
- Qualifications: 5+ years in full stack development with leadership experience in PHP and JavaScript frameworks.
The predicted salary is between 75000 - 75000 £ per year.
Lead Full Stack Engineer| Edinburgh (Hybrid) | Permanent | £65,000 - £75,000 per annum
A Gov Tech 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, Inertia JS and Next JS 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, Inertia JS admin interfaces, a Next JS 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), Inertia JS or strong React
- Pest or PHPUnit - feature, unit and browser testing
- Postgre SQL - migrations, indexing, complex queries
- Experience with queues and background jobs (SQS/Redis, idempotent job design, dead-letter handling)
- Next JS 14+ (App Router), React 18+, Type Script
- 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 Next JS hosting, application observability tooling (e. g. Sentry)
- Cypress or Playwright, MSW for E2E mocking
- RBAC and multi-tenant, team-scoped data patterns
- Git Hub 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
- 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, Type Script, 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, Next JS, Type Script, Inertia JS, Postgre SQL, Tailwind CSS, Technical Lead, Gov Tech, Edinburgh
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