Forward Deployed Engineer (Remote UK with client travel)

A VC-backed, AI-native startup is 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.

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 challenging them when the proposed solution isn't the right one.
• Commercial enough to understand the outcome: You care about what changes for the customer, whether that's reducing manual work, improving efficiency, reducing errors or creating measurable commercial value.
• Scrappy enough to build from zero: You're comfortable operating without a perfect process, established playbook or clearly defined requirements. You can move between understanding a business problem, building a technical solution and getting it working in a live environment.

Although the role offers remote working between engagements, being physically on-site with customers is a core part of the job. At the beginning of an engagement, expect to spend approximately 3 days per week on-site with the customer. As relationships and deployments become established, this requirement typically reduces. Customer engagements generally last between 6 weeks and 3 months, so you'll need to be comfortable travelling regularly and immersing yourself in different business environments. All reasonable business travel, including flights and accommodation, is covered.

What You Can Expect:

• Up to £180,000 base salary
• Equity / stock options
• Remote working across the UK or mainland Europe between customer engagements
• Significant autonomy and ownership
• The opportunity to help shape and scale the FDE function
• Exposure to some of the most interesting applications of AI in enterprise environments
• Direct access to senior leadership
• A VC-backed startup entering its next phase of international growth, including US expansion
• A high-performance environment where exceptional talent is recognised and rewarded

This is an opportunity for someone who wants to do more than build technology in isolation. You’ll be taking AI into real businesses, working side-by-side with customers, solving messy operational problems and seeing the impact of your work first-hand.