Whether you come from an AI-first background or a platform engineering background, you are welcome here. The AI-first developer brings rigour and reasoning; the platform engineer brings domain knowledge and an instinct for what good looks like. Either way, we'll help you get there.
What You'll Be Doing
The precision described above is not a separate activity from delivery — it is how we deliver. In practice the role covers:
Designing, building, and maintaining the software and tooling used to deploy, configure, and operate i2's products across desktop, single-box, on-premise, and cloud targets
Building production-grade container images and the interfaces they expose to hosting platforms
Owning the deployment and upgrade story for stateful distributed components, including recovery paths from shapes already shipped to customers
Delivering releases to customers across diverse and often restricted environments, and supporting the upgrade paths from what is already in the field
Developing internal platform capabilities that let R&D teams self-serve infrastructure and software
Maintaining and improving CI/CD pipelines and internal developer tooling
Instrumenting deployments and the delivery pipeline so that decisions are made on data
Contributing to architectural decisions, validating that what gets built matches what was specified, and owning the quality of AI-generated output
Owning the testing strategy for deployments
What We're Looking For
The things we care most about are the ones that are hardest to teach: a spec-first way of working, design thinking, and the judgement to know when something that looks right is not.
Specifically
You can take a vague requirement, interrogate it, record the decision and its trade-offs, and define the test that would prove it wrong
You can decompose a system into components with clear responsibilities, decide where a boundary belongs, and be concrete about what crosses it and how it is authenticated
You are AI-first or ready to commit to it — not just willing to try it alongside your existing workflow
Cloud deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code — you have built deployments on a major cloud and understand the tooling
You have the judgement to recognise when AI output is wrong — a plausible implementation that quietly violates a security invariant, or a port that looks correct and is not
You are comfortable working in technologies and deployment topologies you have not encountered before, and you learn them quickly
The technical depth we look for sits alongside those traits, not above them. We want experience in platform or software engineering in a commercial environment — enough exposure to deployment and operational concerns to write meaningful specs and validate AI output against them:
Experience shipping software to structurally different deployment targets; you understand why they differ, not just that they do
Container technology: you have built and shipped production-grade images, not just run them locally
Cloud deployment and Infrastructure-as-Code: you have worked with AWS and understand the tooling
Application security: you understand trust boundaries, identity models, and secrets handling
CI/CD pipelines: you have built and maintained them, not just consumed them
You can work effectively with engineers, architects, and non-technical stakeholders
The role may require UK national Security Check (SC) vetting;
candidates must be eligible for and willing to undergo this if needed.
Bachelor's degree in software engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent experience
What You'll Work With
These are the technologies you will be working with day to day
AI coding tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) as the primary development workflow
AWS today, with Azure and Google Cloud planned
Infrastructure as code: AWS CDK and CloudFormation
CI/CD with CircleCI and internal developer tooling
Docker and production image pipelines
Deployment tooling for Windows and Linux, including desktop installer and packaging
Apache Solr, ZooKeeper, DB2, SQL Server, Postgres
Ansible for configuration management
Python
Helpful, But Not Required
Kubernetes
AWS or Azure certification in one or more disciplines
FastAPI, React, or TypeScript, for internal developer tooling and portals
About i2 Group
i2 Group is the global leader in advanced visual analysis solutions. We empower analysts and investigators to discover, create, and disseminate actionable intelligence to combat threats including crime, terrorism, war, and fraud. Our software helps analysts transform data in real time, enabling customers to detect, disrupt, and defeat sophisticated threats across law enforcement, fraud and financial crime, military defence, and national security.
Benefits
Salary: £45,0000 - £65,000
25 days holiday + 5 Personal Days leave + bank holidays
Private health and dentalcare
Employee share options
Annual Lifestyle Reward amounting £325 per annum/pro rata.
Supporting Your Application
Our recruitment process comprises interviews and, at times, a written exercise, an assessment day, and/or a presentation. As an equal opportunities employer, we want to do all we can to make this a positive experience for you. If your application progresses, please make us aware of any adjustments or additional support we can provide.
