Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer AI - Managing Consultant - Permanent

Location: Manchester, London, Glasgow - Hybrid/Flexible

Salary up to £88,000 + Bonus

SC Eligibility or Active essential

We're looking for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), senior technologists who combine deep hands-on engineering with the judgement and presence to operate as a trusted advisor at client sites. This isn't a traditional consulting or traditional engineering role. It's both, at once. You'll be the person a client CTO calls when something needs to be architected, built, and defended in the same week.

In this role, you will:

• Embed directly within client environments (often on-site or hybrid) to design and build bespoke AI and agentic solutions against live, high-stakes business problems.
• Own technical architecture end to end: from initial discovery and stakeholder workshops through to production deployment, taking personal accountability for delivery quality.
• Move fluidly between hands-on coding (backend, frontend, infrastructure) and senior stakeholder engagement, including presenting architecture, trade-offs, and roadmap directly to Director and C-suite audiences.
• Rapidly prototype solutions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, then harden them into robust, scalable, secure production systems.
• Build and run evaluation frameworks that give clients confidence in model and system behaviour, treating evals as a first-class part of the delivery lifecycle rather than an afterthought.
• Act as a technical anchor for delivery teams, setting engineering standards, unblocking hard problems, and mentoring engineers around evaluation-driven development and agentic best practice.
• Shape commercial conversations: sizing effort, identifying scope risk, and contributing to how engagements are structured and priced.
• Build and protect trust with client technical leadership, acting as the credible link between what's technically possible and what the business actually needs.

Your Profile:

Seniority and Experience

• Significant experience as a senior or principal-level software engineer or architect, with a track record of owning systems end to end in production.
• Demonstrated experience operating client-facing or customer-facing in a consulting, professional services, or startup environment, comfortable being judged on both code and client outcomes.
• Experience working directly with senior stakeholders (CTO, VP Engineering, Director level), including running workshops and presenting technical strategy to non-technical audiences.

Technical Expertise

• Backend Development: Deep experience building production microservices, ideally Python or TypeScript.
• Frontend Development: Strong experience with React and TypeScript, using frameworks such as Next.js or Vite.
• AI and Agentic Systems: Hands-on experience designing and deploying agentic architectures using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, or the Anthropic Agent SDK, including tool use, MCP servers, and multi-agent orchestration.
• LLM Experience: Practical, production experience with LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Llama) and an informed view on model selection trade-offs.
• Cloud Platforms: Strong proficiency in AWS or Azure or GCP, including designing for scale, security, and cost.
• Containerisation and Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and Docker Compose.
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform or equivalent.
• Evaluation and Monitoring: Experience with evaluation-driven development and LLM observability tooling such as Langsmith, Langfuse, Braintrust, or similar.
• CI/CD: Comfortable owning pipelines end to end (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins).
• Database Management: Experience with vector databases (ChromaDB, Pinecone, PGVector, Qdrant, MongoDB Vector Search); familiarity with NoSQL (MongoDB preferred) and SQL (PostgreSQL) databases.