Forward Deployed Engineer in London

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services in strategy and consulting, interactive, technology and operations, with digital capabilities across all of these services. With our thought leadership and culture of innovation, we apply industry expertise, diverse skill sets and next-generation technology to each business challenge. We believe in inclusion and diversity and supporting the whole person. Our core values comprise of Stewardship, Best People, Client Value Creation, One Global Network, Respect for the Individual and Integrity.

Year after year, Accenture is recognized worldwide not just for business performance but for inclusion and diversity too. “Across the globe, one thing is universally true of the people of Accenture: We care deeply about what we do and the impact we have with our clients and with the communities in which we work and live. It is personal to all of us.” – Julie Sweet, Accenture CEO

Role Description

This is not a consulting role. It is not a project delivery role. It is not a research position. A Forward Deployed AI Engineer is a production engineer who works embedded inside a client's enterprise, shoulder to shoulder with their teams, to make complex AI platforms work in real, messy organizational environments. You own outcomes: time-to-value, adoption, reliability, and scalability. Not delivery milestones. Outcomes.

The market is beginning to understand what leading technology companies have demonstrated: AI products fail not because the models are weak but because deployment is broken. The gap between a successful AI pilot and an AI capability that scales is bridged by engineers who can translate platform capability into measurable business value inside a real enterprise environment. That is this role.

Forward Deployed AI Engineers form the execution spine of our Reinvention Deployment Engineering pods. We are building the largest FDE capability in the services industry. The engineers who join at this stage will define what the role looks like at scale and will have access to the hardest enterprise AI problems in the market across every industry.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise AI platform deployments across complex multi-stakeholder client environments — Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, SAP, or Palantir — owning the full programme from architecture through adoption.
• Own programme-level delivery outcomes: time-to-value, reliability, adoption velocity, and scalability across multiple concurrent workstreams, with commercial metrics attached.
• Lead rapid experimentation at pace: drive ambiguous business problems to working production systems in days or weeks across complex enterprise environments.
• Architect and govern enterprise AI solutions across the full technology stack: identity, data, security, governance, platform layer, and multi-system workflow integration at programme scale.
• Shape AI reinvention strategy for client CTO, CFO, and CISO: build value architecture, ROI backlogs, use case prioritisation frameworks, and multi-year AI adoption roadmaps.
• Define and publish reusable reinvention blueprints, patterns, and accelerators that scale across multiple client engagements and grow the FDE practice.
• Lead architecture design sessions, executive workshops, and code-with sessions with client engineering and C-suite leadership teams.
• Codify delivery learnings, failure patterns, and engineering standards that shape the FDE practice and enable the next generation of forward deployed engineers.

Basic Qualifications

• 8-10 years engineering experience with cloud-native systems (APIs, microservices, containerization, serverless).
• Minimum of 1 year of deep expertise in designing and deploying agentic solutions (agents, orchestration, context engineering, RAG, workflows) in production environments.
• Minimum of 7 years of experience with AI platforms — OpenAI, Claude, Vertex AI, plus open-source models — including building abstraction layers to manage multi-provider pipelines.
• 8-10 years of experience leading software engineering teams: overseeing delivery, allocating resources across workstreams, and owning the professional development of direct reports.
• Demonstrated end-to-end delivery ownership in a client-embedded environment; internal projects, vendor labs, or team-only deployments do not qualify.
• Proven ability to articulate business value: can quantify the impact of deployments in terms a CFO would recognize and act on.
• Experience presenting to and building trust with senior client stakeholders, CTO, CFO, or CISO level.
• Non-linear profiles are expected and welcomed; assessment is based on demonstrated deployment experience and outcome ownership, not CV pattern matching.
• People lead responsibilities: experience managing, developing, and performance-managing a team of engineers; setting individual development plans and conducting career conversations.

What’s In It For You

At Accenture, in addition to a competitive basic salary, you will also have an extensive benefits package which includes 30 days of vacation per year, access to app-based fitness classes and discounts on a range of gyms, private medical insurance and three days leave per year for charitable work of your choice! We strive to help our people create the right work-life balance that allows them to realise their full potential. Please speak to your recruiter about the working pattern that works best for you.

Location: Your home office will be in London. This role is client-facing and may therefore involve travel, working in other parts of the UK as well as overseas depending on the needs of the project.