Full Stack Software Engineer – 1 Year Contract

About the role

Activate Interactive is seeking a Full Stack Software Engineer to lead the development of a Whole‑of‑Government Chat platform. The role combines technical leadership with hands‑on development of search and generative AI capabilities, delivering secure, scalable solutions for public‑sector users.

Key responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to an agile, cross‑functional development team.
• Define and communicate technical vision across multiple workstreams.
• Design scalable, secure, and resilient architectures for search and AI‑powered systems.
• Make architectural trade‑offs balancing performance, cost, reliability, and security.
• Guide the team from experimentation to production‑ready AI systems.
• Champion Agile technical practices such as TDD, pair programming, refactoring, and CI/CD.
• Lead DevOps adoption, including build and release automation and infrastructure improvements.
• Oversee automated testing strategy (unit, integration, performance) and resolve technical blockers.

Required profile

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical decisions and mentor engineers.
• Experience identifying technical risks early and implementing mitigation strategies.
• Strong understanding of secure, resilient system design for public‑sector applications.
• Proven track record of introducing emerging technologies responsibly.
• Ability to collaborate closely with Product Owners and Business Analysts.

Required skills

• LLM integrations (e.g., Azure OpenAI, OpenAI APIs).
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques.
• Semantic search and vector database technologies.
• AI guardrails: evaluation frameworks, observability, monitoring.
• Data governance and security considerations for AI systems.
• Test‑Driven Development (TDD) and pair programming.
• Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• DevOps practices, build and release automation.
• Automated testing (unit, integration, performance).
• Infrastructure improvement and cloud‑native deployment.