Forward Deployed Engineer (Senior)

Role overview

A senior engineering position focused on leading applied AI deployments for enterprise customers. The role bridges business discovery, solution design, and production-grade software delivery across AI systems, agents, and supporting infrastructure. It is customer-facing, with significant autonomy and responsibility for taking ambiguous problems from initial scoping through to stable production operation.

Responsibilities

- Run technical discovery with customer stakeholders and translate 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 tune an internal AI agent platform, including context, tools, permissions, evaluations, observability, and safety guardrails - Coordinate releases, telemetry, engineering work, and operational handover through an internal delivery orchestration platform - Drive architecture decisions across model selection, retrieval, APIs, data stores, cloud services, and customer-side systems - Establish evaluation suites and production metrics covering quality, reliability, security, latency, adoption, and cost - Diagnose complex production issues and lead incident response for the deployments you own - Mentor engineers, perform code reviews, and raise the technical standard of the deployment team - Communicate trade-offs, progress, and risk to engineering teams and executive stakeholders alike

Requirements

- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership of production systems - Advanced Python skills plus strong proficiency in TypeScript, JavaScript, or another production-grade language - Hands-on experience delivering AI, machine learning, data-intensive, or automation products into production - Strong systems design capability 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 - Demonstrated ability to lead technical discovery and work directly with senior customer stakeholders - Comfort operating independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and leaving behind stable, maintainable systems

Nice to have

- Experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar across cross-functional deployment teams - Background working across multiple customer or industry contexts, including regulated or high-stakes environments

Benefits and work setup

- Collaboration primarily aligned to UK, European, and South African business hours - Occasional travel to customer sites or company offices when a deployment requires it - Recruitment process includes human review, with AI-assisted tools used to organise application information - Reasonable accommodation available during the application and interview process