Forward Deployed Engineer; Remote client

• Forward Deployed Engineer (Remote with client travel)
• Up to £180,000 + Equity
• UK Remote with Customer Travel
• VC-backed, AI-native startup transforming how large businesses automate complex operational processes

Following a £20M+ Series A, the company is scaling its Forward Deployed Engineering team across the UK, working with enterprise customers to bring AI into real-world business operations.

This is a high-impact role for a Senior Solutions Engineer who enjoys working at the intersection of AI, technology, customers and business transformation.

Crucially, this isn't a remote Solutions Engineering role. You'll need to be comfortable physically embedding yourself with customers, understanding how their businesses operate and building solutions alongside them on-site.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with customers to understand their operational processes, identify opportunities for automation and build solutions that deliver measurable business value. You'll take ownership from initial discovery through to production, spending significant time on-site with customer teams and working closely with internal Product and Engineering.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Embedding yourself within customer organisations to understand their workflows, systems and operational challenges first-hand
• Spending time physically on-site with customers, building relationships with stakeholders and understanding how work actually gets done
• Mapping processes and identifying opportunities for AI-powered automation
• Challenging inefficient or broken processes before automating them
• Translating business requirements into agent behaviour, workflows, decision logic and exception handling
• Building and deploying AI-powered agents and automations using the company's platform
• Connecting solutions to customer systems, including ERPs, portals, databases, spreadsheets and other enterprise tools
• Debugging, testing and iterating on solutions in live customer environments
• Working closely with operational stakeholders across Supply Chain, Finance and Operations
• Measuring deployment impact and ensuring solutions are adopted successfully
• Feeding customer insights, recurring patterns and technical requirements back into Product and Engineering
• Helping establish repeatable deployment methodologies, tooling and best practices as the FDE function grows

We're deliberately not looking for one specific background or job title. You might be a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Applied AI Engineer, Automation Engineer, Technical Consultant, Founding Engineer or have another technical, customer-facing background.

The key differentiator is having physically worked alongside customers to solve real problems.

You’ll ideally have:

• 5+ years' professional experience in a technical role
• Demonstrable experience working on-site with customers
  , understanding their operations and building or implementing technical solutions alongside them
• Strong practical engineering skills and the ability to write, debug and iterate on scripts
• Experience working with APIs, data, databases and/or enterprise systems
• Familiarity with modern AI tooling, LLMs, agentic systems, prompt engineering, retrieval, evaluation or related technologies
• The ability to use AI development tools effectively while taking ownership of the underlying solution
• Experience taking ambiguous problems from 0→1
• Strong systems thinking and an ability to understand how technical and operational processes interact
• Excellent communication skills and confidence working directly with customers, including senior stakeholders
• The ability to challenge assumptions and improve a process rather than simply implement a requested solution
• A commercial mindset, with a focus on measurable customer outcomes rather than technology for its own sake

Experience in retail, e-commerce, CPG, supply chain, procurement, merchandising, finance operations or similar operational environments would be advantageous, but isn't essential.

The strongest candidates combine several qualities that are rarely found together.

• Technical enough to build: You don't need to be a traditional software engineer, but you need to be comfortable getting into the code, working with APIs and data, and figuring out why something isn't working.
• Customer-focused enough to influence: You're comfortable spending time on-site, building trust with customer teams, understanding their day-to-day challenges and…