Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

AI Infrastructure, Software Engineering & Customer Solutions

About the Role

We are looking for a versatile, hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with customers to design, build, and deliver technical solutions to complex real-world problems.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, solution architecture, and customer delivery. You will work closely with customers to understand their operational and technical challenges, translate their requirements into working software, and implement solutions that deliver measurable value.

You will operate across the full engineering lifecycle, from discovery and technical design through development, integration, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvement. This may involve building new functionality, integrating existing platforms, developing custom applications, automating workflows, or adapting our core product to meet specific customer requirements.

Our work spans cloud-native applications, AI infrastructure, developer tooling, and systems designed to improve the visibility, governance, and auditability of complex workflows, including those executed by AI agents.

Our primary technology stack includes Go, Python, TypeScript, AWS, and Kubernetes, although we value strong engineering fundamentals and are open to candidates with experience in complementary technologies.

You will work as part of a small, focused team, collaborating closely with customers and internal engineers. The role requires someone who is comfortable navigating ambiguity, working directly in customer environments, and taking ownership of problems from initial discovery through to production delivery.

This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys building software, solving unfamiliar problems, and seeing the direct impact of their work on customers.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Engagement & Technical Discovery

• Work directly with customers to understand their business objectives, technical challenges, existing systems, and operational constraints.

• Lead technical discovery sessions to identify problems, define requirements, and establish clear delivery objectives.

• Translate customer needs into practical technical designs, implementation plans, and working solutions.

• Build strong relationships with customer engineers, architects, technical leaders, and other stakeholders.

• Navigate evolving requirements and ambiguous problem spaces, helping customers identify the most effective path forward.

• Set clear expectations around technical feasibility, delivery priorities, trade-offs, and implementation risks.

• Take ownership of customer outcomes, ensuring solutions address the underlying problem rather than simply meeting a list of technical requirements.

Solution Development & Delivery

• Design, build, test, validate, deploy, and maintain software solutions tailored to customer needs.

• Develop applications, services, APIs, integrations, automation, and infrastructure components as required.

• Take solutions from initial concept and prototype through to production deployment and operational handover.

• Integrate our platform with customer systems, data sources, cloud environments, and existing technology stacks.

• Develop proofs of concept and prototypes to validate approaches, then evolve successful solutions into robust, maintainable production systems.

• Troubleshoot complex issues across application, infrastructure, networking, and integration layers.

• Balance speed of delivery with security, reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

• Document technical decisions, implementation details, and operational processes to support ongoing ownership.

AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• Help customers design and implement solutions involving AI-enabled systems, AI agents, agentic workflows, and emerging AI infrastructure.

• Develop capabilities that enable organisations to observe, understand, govern, and audit complex or non-deterministic workflows executed by AI agents.

• Work on authentication, identity, authorisation, data lineage, and auditability to support secure and traceable systems.

• Help customers integrate AI capabilities into existing software development and operational workflows.

• Explore approaches to AI-assisted software development, agentic engineering, code generation, and automated quality validation.

• Apply practical engineering judgement to ensure AI-enabled solutions are verifiable, reliable, secure, and maintainable.

• Stay informed about emerging technologies and identify opportunities to apply them to customer problems.

Cloud, Infrastructure & Systems Integration

• Deploy and operate applications in AWS and other cloud or self-hosted environments.

• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerised application architectures.

• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and deployment workflows.

• Integrate applications with customer identity providers, APIs, databases, networking environments, and enterprise systems.

• Consider security, access controls, observability, resilience, and operational requirements throughout implementation.

• Help customers troubleshoot deployment issues and establish effective processes for operating solutions in production.

• Work within customer-specific technical, security, and infrastructure constraints.

Product Engineering & Continuous Improvement

• Collaborate with internal product and engineering teams to identify product gaps, reusable capabilities, and opportunities to improve the core platform.

• Feed customer insights, technical challenges, and implementation learnings back into product development.

• Distinguish between customer-specific requirements and capabilities that should become part of the broader product.

• Build reusable integrations, components, tooling, and implementation patterns that accelerate future deployments.

• Contribute to architectural decisions, code reviews, testing practices, and engineering standards.

• Where relevant, contribute to open-source initiatives and technical communities, including Linux Foundation projects and associated discussions.

Technical Skills & Experience

We are looking for a strong software engineer who enjoys applying their technical skills to practical customer problems and can work across multiple layers of a modern software stack.

Core technologies

• Go (Golang): Experience building backend services, APIs, infrastructure tooling, or distributed systems.

• Python: Experience developing applications, automation, integrations, or AI-related tooling.

• TypeScript: Experience developing applications, services, APIs, or user-facing components.

• AWS: Experience deploying applications, working with cloud services, and understanding cloud architecture.

• Kubernetes: Familiarity with containerised applications, orchestration, and deployment in production environments.

We do not expect every candidate to be an expert in every technology. Strong software engineering fundamentals, depth in some areas, and the ability to learn and work across the stack are more important than matching every item.

Additional experience that would be beneficial

• Delivering software solutions directly within customer or client environments.

• Working with REST APIs, third-party integrations, databases, and distributed systems.

• Building cloud-native applications, developer tools, infrastructure software, or enterprise platforms.

• Experience with Docker, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated testing, and observability.

• Familiarity with authentication, identity management, authorisation, networking, and security.

• Exposure to AI agents, LLM integrations, agentic workflows, or AI-assisted software development.

• Experience deploying or operating self-hosted software in customer-controlled environments.

• Ability to diagnose unfamiliar technical systems and work through integration challenges.

• Experience in a startup, technical consultancy, professional services, or product engineering environment.

What We're Looking For

• A strong builder: You enjoy writing code, developing systems, and turning ideas into working software.

• Customer-oriented: You care about understanding the customer's problem and delivering an outcome that makes a meaningful difference.

• End-to-end ownership: You are comfortable taking responsibility from initial discovery through implementation, deployment, and handover.

• Adaptable and pragmatic: You can navigate unfamiliar environments, evolving requirements, and technical constraints without losing sight of the objective.

• A broad technical mindset: You can work across application code, APIs, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment processes as needed.

• An effective communicator: You can work directly with customer stakeholders and explain technical decisions, risks, and trade-offs clearly.

• Quality-conscious: You understand the importance of security, testing, reliability, and maintainability, even when working at pace.

• Collaborative: You work well with customers and internal engineering teams, sharing knowledge and turning lessons learned into better solutions.

• Curious and resourceful: You enjoy learning new technologies and finding practical ways to solve difficult problems.

Experience in a traditional Forward Deployed Engineer role is not essential. We would also welcome software engineers, solutions engineers, implementation engineers, and technical consultants who have a strong coding background and want greater ownership of customer outcomes.