Employee Platform Engineer in Edinburgh

Wordsmith is building the legal operations platform for in-house teams, and we're growing fast. We believe in-house legal is becoming one of the most important functions in the AI era. Every business is moving faster, but legal work is still too often scattered across inboxes, chats, documents and disconnected systems. Wordsmith brings that work into one system. Requests come in from across the business, AI agents handle the routine, lawyers stay in control where judgment matters, and every step is captured as work happens.

We're built for in-house legal, not law firms. Our goal is to help legal teams move faster, reduce unnecessary external counsel spend, and become a function the business can run with. More than 500 companies, including Financial Times, Safelite, Trip.com, Canva, Starling and Sage, use Wordsmith. Backed by $100M from Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Highland Europe and others, we're building one of the defining companies in legal AI.

Why this role is different

We treat internal IT as a product and our employees as its users, not as tickets. If your answer to a repeated problem is to do it faster by hand, this isn't the seat — and it isn't a back-room coding role either.

You'll be the engineer who builds the platform that provisions, supports and secures every Wordsmith employee, end to end. The goal is for the function to get more automated as we grow, not need more people.

The Role

You'll own onboarding, access, devices and offboarding as one connected system, and build the tooling — including coding agent workflows — that removes the manual steps at every stage. You'll be hands-on with the physical side of the job too, in the Edinburgh office.

What you'll do

• Build a joiner pipeline that reads a new hire from Humaans, creates their identity in Okta, assigns app access by group rule, and triggers zero-touch laptop enrolment in Jamf — no manual steps.
• Build a Slack assistant, backed by a coding agent, that handles requests like “I need access to X” or “my laptop is slow” and either fixes them or routes them, resolving most without a human.
• Build a hardware vending machine for the Edinburgh office that dispenses chargers, dongles, headsets and loan laptops against an employee's identity, with stock reordered automatically.
• Write scripts and infrastructure as code that configure devices, enforce security baselines, and produce compliance evidence on their own.
• Build an offboarding flow that revokes access everywhere, wipes and reclaims the device, and files the record the moment someone is marked as a leaver.

What good looks like in the first year

• Zero-touch onboarding: within six months, a new hire's accounts, apps and access provision automatically from Humaans through Okta, and their laptop self-enrols — day one setup takes minutes, not hours.
• Self-service by default: within nine months, the top twenty employee IT requests — access, kit, resets, software — are self-served through automation, chat or a vending machine, not a ticket to a person.
• Automated joiner/mover/leaver: within twelve months, role changes and offboarding run automatically from the HRIS, with access removed same-day and hardware recovered.
• Build over buy: you ship internal tooling and coding agent workflows that remove manual steps, so the function scales on automation, not headcount.
• Secure and audit-ready: the fleet stays managed and SOC 2 evidence generates itself, rather than being assembled by hand before an audit.

Who you might be

We're not hiring a traditional IT person — we're hiring someone who builds. That might mean you're:

• a software engineer who likes owning systems end to end and wants a broad, high-ownership remit.
• a DevOps, SRE or platform engineer who automates infrastructure and wants to point that at people and devices.
• a strong IT or systems person who already codes and automates rather than clicking through consoles.
• someone from a smaller company or an MSP who has wired up tools, identity and devices and scripted the boring parts away.

What matters is the instinct to automate anything you have to do twice, and to build the tool rather than do the task. We'll teach the IT domain to a strong builder — we won't teach someone to be a builder.

What we're looking for

• You write real code and automate with APIs and scripts — Python, Bash or TypeScript. This isn't optional.
• You think in systems: identity, access, data flows and lifecycle.
• You're comfortable using AI coding agents to build and ship tooling fast.
• You care about security and doing things properly, not just quickly.
• You're happy working on-site in Edinburgh and hands-on with real hardware.

Bonus:

• Exposure to identity and device tooling such as Okta, Google Workspace or Jamf.
• Experience with SOC 2 or security compliance.
• Having run or automated onboarding, endpoints or internal tools before.

How we work

This role is on-site in Edinburgh, reporting into Security — you'll be hands-on with the actual fleet, not just its dashboards. It's a high-trust environment: you own the systems you build, end to end, with light process and a bias toward shipping. This isn't a back-room coding role. You own real employee outcomes and the physical office setup alongside the software.

What you can expect

• Real ownership over the platform that runs every Wordsmith employee, from identity to hardware.
• Freedom to build over buy — you ship the tooling, not just work the tickets.
• We'll teach you the IT and security domain — you bring the instinct to automate.

Why Wordsmith

We're growing quickly, and every new hire adds more identity, access and devices to manage. Getting that right — automated, secure and audit-ready — is core to how fast and how safely we can scale as a company. If you want to build the system that runs an entire company's IT, rather than staff it, this is a strong place to do it.