Role Requirements
Position: Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) with a focus on engineering excellence.
Open to candidates from startups, scale-ups, or big tech companies.
Candidate Requirements
Emphasis on candidates from good companies with solid work experience; top UK university preferred.
Must be full stack; proficiency in Python and some front-end experience is important.
Work Arrangement
Role is onsite in London, ideally five days a week with some flexibility.
Company Overview
Raised seed round from Initialized and North Zone; planning to raise Series A soon.
Rapid growth with a plan to double headcount from 20 to 40 by year-end.
Interview Process
Four rounds: 25-minute fit conversation, technical chat, take-home assessment, and CTO interview.
Ideal Candidate Profile
Background from S-tier or A-tier startups, with consistent excellence.
Personable with the ability to be client-facing.
Team and Culture
Team includes individuals from high-caliber companies such as Yandex, Google X, and McKinsey.
Looking for candidates who can grow into leadership roles as the company expands.
Urgency and Hiring Goals
Plan to hire 10 roles total, divided between Forward Deployed Engineer and Member of Technical Staff.
****Dealbreaker****
Work experience
Experience in software engineering / product engineering (S- tier or A- tier startups)
Education
Strong university background (such as a UK top 10 university or IIT)
Hard skills
Full stack engineering experience (Python and frontend)
Soft skills
Product intuition & design sense
Miscellaneous
Ability to work on- site in Shoreditch, London (5 days/week)
Baseline
Seniority
3 - 6 years of experience as a fullstack engineer
Nice-to-have
Work experience
Experience building and shipping systems to real users (excluding prototypes or course projects)
Hard skills
Defensible UI/UX design sense
Miscellaneous
Open to candidates requiring UK visa sponsorship
What we're looking for:
We need someone with roughly 3–6 years of software engineering experience, ideally at a well-regarded startup, fast-growing scale-up or top tech company, who has built something hard and shipped it to real users. That means software that ran in production, broke and got fixed, not a prototype. You should be comfortable sitting with enterprise customers, learning how they actually work and building full-stack software around it in a fast, in-person startup. You should also have a track record of turning messy real-world problems into production systems that people use. Bonus points if you've been a founder or on a founding team, worked as an early engineer at an EF, YC or Antler startup, or held a forward-deployed or solutions engineering role.
What you'll do
- Work inside Seamflow's enterprise customers. These are some of the largest certification bodies, notified bodies and inspection companies in the testing, inspection and certification (TIC) industry. You'll join their calls, read their real documents and map how they actually run scheduling, technical review, conformity assessment and field inspection.
- Own customer deployments from start to finish and make sure they deliver results. Every customer works differently and there's no template, so you decide what to build, build it and hear about it when it's wrong.
- Work closely with the founders, the lead engineer and the CTO to turn what you learn in the field into product improvements, so that work done for one customer can be reused across the platform.
- Build AI-powered workflows and document intelligence that pull structure and meaning out of messy Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and email, replacing the manual processes that keep the physical economy safe.
- Lead work from first scoping call to production rollout. That covers the interface, the backend, the data model and the LLM/model layer. You'll ship to production in your first week.
- Review and improve hundreds of real outputs to raise accuracy, reliability and customer adoption, with speed and good judgement about what not to build.
About you
- A strong engineer first. Specific languages matter less than raw ability. Python plus some frontend counts as full-stack, but pure frontend profiles aren't a fit.
- Personable, credible and confident in front of customers. If you haven't done forward-deployed work before but are a strong, customer-ready engineer, that's fine.
- Driven to build from the ground up and take a lot of ownership. You don't want tickets handed to you each morning.
- Able to work on-site in Shoreditch, London, five days a week. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are available.
Tech stack:
TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, AI/ML, LLMs, Document Intelligence, SQL, Cloud Infrastructure.
What to ask candidates
Do you code across the whole stack? We don't care about specific frameworks. Python plus some frontend works for us. Just tell us what you've built on both the backend and frontend side so we know you're not purely frontend.
What's the biggest thing you've built from the ground up? Think founder or founding engineer work or an early-stage startup. Walk us through your role and what you shipped.
Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate?
What is their salary expectation?
How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?
Member of Technical Staff in London employer: American IT Systems
Palantir is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration among high-complexity teams. With a focus on employee growth, we provide opportunities for professional development in cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform, all while contributing to meaningful projects that support UK Government programs in defense. Our London location not only offers a vibrant city life but also a unique chance to work on secure and scalable infrastructure that makes a real impact.
