Forward Deployed Engineer in London

Most AI roles keep you at arm’s length from the people the agents are supposed to help. This one puts you in the room with them. We’re building AI agents for risk managers, internal auditors, and compliance professionals, not assistants that surface suggestions, but agents that own complex, multi-step workflows end to end. Agents that an audit team can hand a task to and trust it will come back done. Getting from a promising agent prototype to something a Chief Audit Officer depends on is a completely different discipline to building the prototype. That’s what this role is about.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, roughly 80% of your time is with our biggest enterprise customers across Europe and the US. You’re embedded in their environments, sitting with internal audit teams as they plan an audit programme, with risk functions assessing their control landscape, with compliance teams navigating regulatory obligations. You’re not there to show them what the agents already do. You’re there to understand their world well enough to discover what the agents need to do next. You run discovery workshops, identify which workflows are genuinely ripe for agentic automation, prototype rapidly, test with real practitioners, and stay until the agent is reliable enough to be trusted. The other 20% is feeding everything you’ve learned back into the platform. The goal isn’t to accumulate bespoke agent builds, it’s to identify the patterns across risk and audit functions that should be generalised, so every subsequent engagement is faster and the agents get better for everyone.

You sit in Product with a matrix into Engineering, which means you shape both the agent roadmap and the technical decisions that make agents work in production. This is not a sales role and it’s not consulting. You write code. You build evaluation infrastructure. You design golden datasets grounded in real audit and risk workflows. You catch agent regressions before a customer’s compliance team does. You’re accountable for outcomes.

The Hard Parts of Agentic AI Are Your Domain: Silent regressions when a model updates. Context window degradation across long audit workflows. Prompt instability under varied user inputs. Non-deterministic outputs in environments where a compliance officer needs to explain every decision to a regulator. You know these failure modes and you know how to build the guardrails, tracing, and evaluation infrastructure that prevents them.

The Customer Environment: Enterprise GRC, global banks, large regulated corporates, sophisticated internal audit and risk functions across Europe and the US. You don’t need a compliance background, but you need the curiosity to learn it fast and the presence to earn trust with senior risk and audit professionals. These are people whose professional reputations depend on getting this right; that’s a good reason to make the agents actually reliable. Travel is a meaningful part of this role. You’ll be on-site regularly with enterprise customers across EU and US markets. If you’re energised by variety, different industries, different regulatory cultures, different stages of agent maturity - this will suit you well.

These are the essentials you’ll need to get an interview:

• Have shipped at least one production agent and know what the reliability cliff feels like
• Understand the full Agent Development Life Cycle: evaluation, guardrails, observability, regression - not just deployment
• Are as comfortable in a room with a Chief Risk Officer as you are debugging a failing agent trace
• Are genuinely curious about how risk managers, internal auditors, and compliance professionals work
• Can tell the difference between a workflow that needs an agent and one that needs a button
• Want to be the person who makes enterprise agentic AI actually land, not the person who hands it off

People who do this kind of work go on to exceptional careers in product creation, product leadership, and founding companies. There is no faster path to understanding how to build agentic AI that creates real value than embedding directly with the people it needs to serve.

About Us: Diligent is the AI leader in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) SaaS solutions, helping more than 1 million users and 700,000 board members to clarify risk and elevate governance. The Diligent One Platform gives practitioners, the C-Suite and the board a consolidated view of their entire GRC practice so they can more effectively manage risk, build greater resilience and make better decisions, faster. At Diligent, we're building the future with people who think boldly and move fast. Whether you're designing systems that leverage large language models or part of a team reimagining workflows with AI, you'll help us unlock entirely new ways of working and thinking. Curiosity is in our DNA, we look for individuals willing to ask the big questions and experiment fearlessly - those who embrace change not as a challenge, but as an opportunity. The future belongs to those who keep learning, and we are building it together.

At Diligent, you’re not just building the future - you’re an agent of positive change, joining a global community on a mission to make an impact. Creativity is ingrained in our culture. We are innovative collaborators by nature. We thrive in exploring how things can be different both in our internal processes and to help our clients. We care about our people. Diligent offers a flexible work environment, global days of service, comprehensive health benefits, meeting-free days, generous time off policy and wellness programmes to name a few.

We have teams all over the world. We may be headquartered in New York City, but we have office hubs in Washington D.C., Vancouver, London, Galway, Budapest, Munich, Bengaluru, Singapore, and Sydney. Diversity is important to us. Growing, maintaining and promoting a diverse team is a top priority for us. We foster and encourage diversity through our Employee Resource Groups and provide access to resources and education to support the education of our team, facilitate dialogue, and foster understanding.

Diligent created the modern governance movement. Our world-changing idea is to empower leaders with the technology, insights and connections they need to drive greater impact and accountability – to lead with purpose. Our employees are passionate, smart, and creative people who not only want to help build the software company of the future, but who want to make the world a more sustainable, equitable and better place.

To foster strong collaboration and connection, this role will follow a hybrid work model. If you are within a commuting distance to one of our Diligent office locations, you will be expected to work onsite at least 50% of the time. We believe that in-person engagement helps drive innovation, teamwork, and a strong sense of community.

We are a drug-free workplace. Diligent is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, colour, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy, childbirth, physical disability, mental disability, age, military status, protected veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner or civil union status, gender (including sex stereotyping and gender identity or expression), medical condition (including, but not limited to, cancer-related or HIV/AIDS related), genetic information, or sexual orientation in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us.

At Diligent, we recognize the value of a diverse global workforce. Visa sponsorship may be available for select positions based on business needs and specific role requirements. Sponsorship decisions are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and eligibility should not be assumed for all opportunities.