Forward Deployed Engineer (Senior)

Role overview

A senior engineering position focused on leading customer-facing applied AI deployments from initial discovery through production handover. The role blends hands-on software engineering with technical leadership, partnering directly with business and technical stakeholders to translate ambiguous problems into sequenced, measurable deployment plans.

Responsibilities

- Lead technical discovery with customer stakeholders and convert ambiguous business problems into sequenced, measurable deployment plans - Design and build production applied AI systems, agent workflows, data pipelines, integrations, and supporting services - Configure and operate an AI agent harness covering context, tools, permissions, evaluations, observability, and guardrails - Orchestrate releases, telemetry, engineering work, and operational handover through a dedicated engineering orchestration platform - Make architecture decisions across models, retrieval, APIs, data stores, cloud services, and customer systems - Establish evaluation suites and production metrics covering quality, reliability, security, latency, adoption, and cost - Diagnose complex production issues and lead incident response for owned customer workflows - Mentor engineers, review code, and raise the technical standard of the deployment team - Communicate trade-offs, progress, and risk to both engineering teams and executive stakeholders

Requirements

- Six or more years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems - Advanced Python skills and strong experience with TypeScript, JavaScript, or another production language - Hands-on experience delivering AI, machine learning, data-intensive, or automation products into production - Strong systems design skills across APIs, SQL and NoSQL data stores, cloud infrastructure, security, and observability - Practical knowledge of LLM application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, structured outputs, evaluations, and agent orchestration - Experience leading technical discovery and working directly with senior customer stakeholders - Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and leave behind stable, maintainable systems

Benefits and work setup

- London-based with collaboration primarily during UK and European business hours - Travel to customer offices when a deployment requires it - Opportunity to engage with senior stakeholders across financial services, insurance, technology, healthcare, and other regulated industries