Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

📍 London | 5 days in office | Up to 25% client travel

💰 £150,000 - £300,000 base + equity

💼 The Role

We're working with a fast-growing developer tools company building cutting-edge technology that automatically generates and maintains frontend browser tests. Following significant funding and rapid growth, they're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join their London engineering team and help build the FDE function from the ground up.

You'll own complex customer deployments end-to-end, working directly with engineering leaders and senior engineers to understand their architecture, design integrations and solve difficult technical problems. This isn't a traditional Solutions Architect or Sales Engineer position. You'll spend significant time writing production code, debugging unfamiliar systems and making changes to the core product alongside the engineering team.

The ideal person combines exceptional software engineering ability with the communication skills and commercial drive to own customer relationships. You'll need to be equally comfortable digging into a difficult codebase, building something from scratch and discussing technical decisions with a VP of Engineering.

🚀 Key Responsibilities

• Own technical customer engagements from initial scoping through integration, deployment and rollout
• Understand complex customer architectures and design solutions that work within their systems
• Write production code and ship product changes needed to make deployments successful
• Debug complex issues across browser technology, CI integrations, web APIs and customer environments
• Work directly with senior engineering stakeholders as the technical lead for each account
• Feed customer learnings back into the product and personally ship improvements where appropriate
• Partner closely with the core engineering team on larger product and architectural challenges
• Help define the tooling, processes and best practices for a new Forward Deployed Engineering function

🌟 What We're Looking For

• 3-8 years' experience in demanding software engineering environments
• Strong computer science fundamentals and exceptional hands-on coding ability
• Experience working in high-growth startups or similarly technically demanding environments
• Evidence of exceptional technical ability, such as a top CS degree, strong engineering company, founding experience, competitive programming, open-source work or similar
• Comfortable navigating, understanding and debugging large, unfamiliar codebases
• Experience building and shipping production software, ideally including greenfield or 0-to-1 products
• Strong interest or experience in customer-facing engineering, integrations, deployments or technical pilots
• Able to communicate confidently with both hands-on engineers and senior engineering leadership
• Highly driven, resourceful and comfortable taking ownership of difficult, ambiguous problems
• Happy spending the majority of the role working directly with customers while remaining deeply hands-on technically

💰 Package

• £150,000 - £300,000 base salary
• Competitive equity
• 5 days per week in the London office
• Up to 25% travel to customer sites