Forward Deployed Engineer (Principal)

Role overview

A principal-level position leading the most complex and strategically significant applied AI deployments for enterprise customers. The role blends executive advisory, product strategy, architecture, and hands-on engineering to frame problems, define production paths, and resolve the hardest technical constraints. The engineer also creates repeatable deployment patterns that lift outcomes across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

- Lead executive and technical discovery for complex enterprise programmes, identifying where applied AI delivers measurable operational value. - Define target architecture, deployment strategy, governance model, and technical success measures for multi-team AI initiatives. - Design and, where necessary, build the highest-risk components across agents, models, data, integrations, infrastructure, and security. - Set standards for context, tool authority, permissions, evaluations, guardrails, and observability within the agent harness. - Coordinate delivery through the orchestration platform across customer teams, engineers, AI agents, and partners. - Guide model and vendor selection while preserving customer control over data, infrastructure, performance, and cost. - Review architectures, unblock critical incidents, and decide on reliability, security, and regulated-industry questions. - Develop reusable deployment patterns, reference architectures, and engineering practices. - Mentor senior engineers and act as a trusted technical counterpart to CTOs, CIOs, and heads of engineering. - Partner with product leaders to turn field insight into platform and agent harness improvements.

Requirements

- Ten or more years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of leading complex production programmes. - Deep expertise in distributed systems, data platforms, cloud architecture, or machine learning systems, paired with strong hands-on coding ability. - Proven experience taking AI, machine learning, or data-intensive products from ambiguous requirements into reliable production use. - Expert knowledge of system architecture, APIs, security, observability, and data governance. - Strong communication skills for engaging executive stakeholders and mentoring senior engineers. - Degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Benefits and work setup

- Hybrid working from London, with travel to customer sites or offices when a deployment requires it. - Collaboration primarily during UK and European business hours. - Equal opportunity employer offering reasonable accommodation during the application and interview process.