Forward Deployed Engineer

Lead Forward Deployed Engineer AI / Product / Consulting

Location:

Hybrid Job Type: Full-time Level: Lead / Principal Individual Contributor The Opportunity We're working with an innovative, global digital health technology business that partners with major organisations across the pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare sectors. They are looking for a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer who can operate across three disciplines that are often split between different roles: consulting, product leadership and hands-on engineering .

You'll work directly with clients to understand complex business and technical challenges, determine what is worth building, and then personally take solutions from idea through to production. This is not a traditional engineering role where you'll receive a fully defined backlog and focus solely on implementation. You'll be expected to shape the problem, make product decisions, build the solution and own the outcome .

The role would suit an experienced engineer who is operating at the forefront of AI development and is equally comfortable writing production code, challenging a product strategy, presenting to senior stakeholders and working directly with clients. How You'll Work The role is built around three core areas:
Shape Work with business and technical leaders to turn ambiguous problems into clear, valuable and buildable opportunities. You'll:
Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders. Separate the problem a client describes from the underlying problem they actually need to solve. Structure ambiguity into clear hypotheses, options, trade-offs and recommendations. Develop business cases around value, cost, adoption risk and expected outcomes. Communicate effectively with both technical and executive audiences. Decide Take ownership of what should be built and what shouldn't.

You'll:
Translate product discovery into a focused, outcome-driven roadmap. Own scope, priorities, sequencing and trade-offs. Create clear product documentation including problem briefs, PRDs, user stories and acceptance criteria. Define and track meaningful success metrics. Work closely with UX and design teams to ensure solutions are built around genuine user needs. Run agile delivery processes, including backlogs, sprints, demos and releases. Continue to own and iterate on products after launch based on user feedback and performance data.

Build & Deploy When the problem is defined, you'll get hands-on and build. You'll:
Build production-quality software using Python and/or Type Script . Develop full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents and workflows. Work with technologies including Next.js, React, FastAPI, Fastify, FastMCP and Hono . Design and implement agentic applications using technologies such as Lang Graph, Auto Gen, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI tooling or custom orchestration frameworks . Integrate leading and self-hosted LLMs with tools, data and external systems using MCP and custom connectors .

Implement RAG solutions using vector databases and hybrid retrieval where appropriate. Work across relational, document, key-value and graph databases depending on the problem. Develop prompt and context engineering approaches focused on accuracy, reliability, cost and latency. Make structured use of AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Git Hub Copilot and Codex . Fine-tune or adapt models where there is a genuine use case.

Production & Engineering You'll own solutions all the way into production, including:
Infrastructure and deployment. AI evaluation and testing frameworks. MCP server implementation. Cloud deployment across AWS, Azure, Cloudflare or Vercel . Docker, Kubernetes and/or serverless architectures. TDD and robust software engineering practices. Security, secrets management and SAST/DAST. Structured logging, monitoring, metrics and tracing. Automated CI/CD using tools such as Git Hub Actions or Jenkins . Performance, scalability and cost optimisation. Operational ownership of the systems you build.

Leadership & Mentoring Although this is an individual contributor role, you'll have significant influence across projects and teams. You'll:
Mentor engineers in AI engineering, system design, product thinking and agentic architectures. Set the technical and product standard on client engagements. Review work, raise engineering standards and unblock teams. Contribute to reusable accelerators, playbooks and technical assets. Help interview, onboard and develop future team members. What We're Looking For Engineering 6 years' experience building production software. At least 3 years' experience building production applications using AI and/or agentic development approaches .

Strong hands-on experience building agents and multi-step AI workflows not simply integrating chat or prompted models.

Experience with agent frameworks such as Lang Graph, Auto Gen, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI tooling or equivalent. Strong Python and/or Type Script experience. Strong understanding of OOP,…