Forward Deployed AI Engineer in Manchester

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.

• 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.

• Engineering experience with cloud-native systems (APIs, microservices, containerization, serverless).
• Deep expertise in designing and deploying agentic solutions (agents, orchestration, context engineering, RAG, workflows) in production environments.
• Experience with AI platforms — OpenAI, Claude, Vertex AI, plus open-source models — including building abstraction layers to manage multi-provider pipelines.
• 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.

• London
• Birmingham
• Manchester
• Newcastle

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