Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Lead the team and own its deliverables

• Line-manage Forward Deployed Engineers as the team grows: hiring, onboarding, objectives, development, and performance.
• Own the team's deliverables and outputs - what is committed, what is delivered, to what standard, and by when.
• Allocate people and effort across the demand pipeline, and be the person who says no, not yet, or not like that.
• Hold the engineering bar through design and code review, and grow engineers into owning engagements themselves.
• Report progress, risk, and capacity to the Head of AI Technology and to business stakeholders honestly, including when delivery is off track.

• Design, build, and product ionise bespoke, higher-complexity AI solutions yourself, taking the hardest and least-defined engagements personally.
• Own the architecture and design decisions for the team's solutions, keeping them secure, scalable, and aligned to the enterprise core stack.
• Take solutions through evaluation, observability, and our AI governance checkpoints, and keep them healthy afterwards.

• Form part of the AI Technical Leadership Team, and build an AI Technology roadmap that lines up with the JHI strategic roadmap.
• Work across the AI technology remits - AI Platforms, AI Architecture, AI Engineering, and AI Governance Implementation - owning the Forward Deployed Engineering deliverables and keeping them aligned to enterprise architecture.
• Contribute to AI technology strategy, standards, and buy-versus-build, and to the investment recommendations and backlog that follow.
• Review new models, tools, and vendors and determine their feasibility here, weighing cost, licensing, security, supportability, and vendor viability alongside capability, and documenting the recommendation - including the recommendation not to adopt.

• Sit with business users and hold the relationship senior enough that the team is invited into problems early rather than handed finished requirements.
• Partner with the AI Enablement Partners on escalated demand, and set realistic expectations with senior stakeholders.
• Build advanced investment capability on Nexus, our agentic workspace, taking models and signals from one desk into a supported, firm-wide capability, and lead the build-out of citizen developer workflows through to production.
• Expose data and capability through Accio, our centralised MCP server, and as skills, tools, and connectors on Nexus, building reusable components rather than one-off integrations.
• Co-build enterprise core-stack deliverables with Percepta and AI Engineering, and represent Forward Deployed Engineering in architecture and design authority forums.

• At minimum eight years in technical, business-facing engineering roles - forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, consulting-side software engineering, or engineering embedded in a business unit - including time as the most senior engineer on the work. Former technical founders are encouraged to apply.
• Experience leading engineers as a line manager, tech lead, or founder. You need not have run a large team, but you must have been accountable for other people's delivery.
• Strong Python and SQL, and a track record of shipping production applications, with hands-on delivery recent enough to still be real.
• Production experience with LLMs - prompt and context engineering, agent development, evaluation, deployment at scale - including agentic capability such as MCP servers, tools, or connectors.
• Experience building data pipelines from APIs and enterprise systems, and working knowledge of a major cloud, ideally Azure, with CI/CD, containers, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience owning a technical roadmap, and judgement on technology selection - you can evaluate a new tool, model, or vendor, test it properly, and defend the recommendation.
• Excellent stakeholder skills, credibility with senior audiences, and the ability to influence without direct authority.
• High agency, genuine interest in the business problem, and willingness to move from building towards leading as the team grows.
• Experience in a regulated environment where governance, compliance, and data sensitivity shape how solutions are built.

• Experience standing up a new engineering team or function from scratch, including hiring and defining how it works.
• Asset management or financial services domain knowledge, particularly…