Forward Deployed AI Engineer in Birmingham

gravity9 is a boutique IT consulting company headquartered in the UK with offices in the US, Canada, Poland, and Colombia. Our team has deep experience in engineering, experience design and product management. We enjoy a challenge and pride ourselves on working with our clients on their most complex problems, finding elegant and flexible solutions that help them transform their businesses.

We are excited to share that our company is experiencing significant growth and expansion, and as a result, we're on the lookout for talented individuals to join our team. We want to be upfront about our hiring process. At this moment, we are in the process of securing projects that align with our business goals and objectives. Our intention is to ensure that once we bring new team members on board, they will have a meaningful and impactful role to play from day one. While we might not be able to extend an offer immediately, we are highly interested in considering you for these future projects.

If you're open to the idea of potentially joining our team in the future, we encourage you to continue with our interview process. We value your time and effort and believe that getting to know you better will help us make an informed decision. Once you have effectively concluded the entire recruitment procedure, we will retain your profile and reach out to you once a suitable opportunity emerges. Additional interviews will not be necessary at this stage, and we anticipate being able to extend an offer to you promptly.

What does the recruitment process look like?

• Recruiter Screen: In the first call, our recruiter will learn more about you and your story to check a potential fit for gravity9. This step might take around 60 mins.
• Tech 1 Interview with our AI Practice Lead: This meeting will take a deeper dive into your experience and what you could bring to the team. This step will take around 75 mins.
• Tech 2 Interview with our software consultants: This meeting will take a deeper dive into your experience and what you could bring to the team. This step will take around 60 mins.
• Final Interview: Here we strive to cooperate with you and give you an opportunity to meet our leadership team during this informal talk. This step will take around 30 mins.

The salary details for the role will be communicated ahead of the first recruitment meeting. Thank you for considering the opportunity to be a part of our growing journey. We look forward to the possibility of working together and achieving great things.

Role Description:

gravity9 is expanding its Forward Deployed Engineering team to build production agentic AI systems for enterprise clients, in partnership with leading frontier-model providers. We already support clients from different verticals to have agentic and RAG systems live in production across healthcare, financial services, retail and global logistics.

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer you work embedded in the client's environment, from discovery, through architecture and build, to production and handover. This is end-to-end agent engineering, not proofs of concept and not advisory work.

Engagements are typically a team of engineers over a few months, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the client's team including architects, DevOps and QA. You are visible to the client from day one.

Responsibilities include:

• Design and build production agentic AI systems.
• Do the unglamorous data work, including ingestion, flattening deeply nested structures, extracting content from unstructured documents, classification, summarisation, tagging, enrichment, indexing.
• Own evaluation and accuracy, establishing a baseline eval dataset at the start of the engagement.
• Engineer for cost and latency, focusing on model selection and routing.
• Ship it properly, ensuring observability and tracing, CI/CD, IaC, monitoring, security and compliance review.
• Transfer knowledge deliberately, ensuring the client owns and can extend the system after we leave.

Job requirements:

Technical skills:

• Strong Python (async, typing, testing, packaging). Working competence in TypeScript / Node is a plus.
• Hands-on production experience with frontier models.
• Built and shipped multi-agent or agentic workflows.
• Experience with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or a strong equivalent, plus SQL.
• Building ingestion and enrichment pipelines over messy structured and unstructured sources.
• Production delivery on AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Git, code review, testing, CI/CD, IaC (Terraform or equivalent).

Soft skills:

• Client presence and credibility.
• Translation of business problems into technical designs.
• Ego-free collaboration in a supporting role.
• Comfort with ambiguity and greenfield.
• Bias to production.
• Teaching instinct.
• Ownership and pace.
• Commercial awareness.
• Resilience and adaptability.
• Written communication.
• Genuine curiosity about the field.

Experience profile:

• FDE (mid): 3+ years software engineering, 1+ years hands-on LLM / agentic work.
• Senior FDE: 5+ years engineering, 2+ years AI or agentic AI.
• Lead FDE: 7+ years, has led delivery teams of 3–7 people.

What success looks like:

• First 90 days — owning a meaningful component of a client-facing agent system.
• 6 months — designing agent architectures independently.
• 12 months — a reference point for others on the team.

What we offer:

• Support for vendor certifications and access to partner training programmes.
• Company-wide AI tooling as part of how we work day to day.