Expert Forward Deployment Engineer in London

The project is focused on improving the security, release reliability, maintainability, and operational resilience of business-critical banking applications. Forward Deployed Engineers will conduct targeted, hands-on engagements with development teams that are facing challenges with vulnerability remediation, automated testing, legacy technology, production stability, or achieving a safe and rapid release cadence. The role combines senior software engineering, DevOps, SRE, test automation, application security, and legacy modernization. Approximately 70% of the work involves hands-on coding and configuration.

The technical scope includes building effective automated test suites, remediating security vulnerabilities, performing dependency and reachability analysis, upgrading Java and NPM runtimes, modernizing Spring and legacy middleware applications, improving CI/CD pipelines, containerizing applications, automating deployments, and introducing standard observability and resilience patterns. The Expert FDE is expected to lead complex engagements, work directly with development and client stakeholders, define the technical remediation approach, implement critical changes personally, and enable client teams to maintain the improved engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead targeted technical engagements addressing security, testing, release, resilience, and legacy technology challenges with development teams.
• Assess application code, dependencies, runtime environment, test coverage, deployment architecture, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational risks.
• Write, debug, review, and enhance production-quality code and configuration throughout engagements.
• Define and implement practical modernization and remediation plans with clear priorities, dependencies, risks, and measurable outcomes.
• Develop or improve unit, integration, component, contract, and deployment smoke tests using Test-Driven Development practices.
• Select appropriate automation-testing approaches per application and drive implementation, including the use of AI coding assistance.
• Source suitable test data and implement secure data masking for lower environments.
• Conduct vulnerability triage, root-cause and dependency reachability analyses, remediation prioritization, secure code changes, and regression testing.
• Upgrade Java, JVM, NPM, Spring, open-source libraries, internal dependencies, installed software, base images, and operating systems to supported versions.
• Establish sustainable dependency-management processes with continuous library updates using Renovate or equivalent tools.
• Modernize legacy applications and middleware stacks, including those deployed on WebSphere or WebLogic.
• Containerize applications using Docker and support deployment to OpenShift.
• Improve source control, branch management, pull-request, and code-review practices.
• Design, implement, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe, repeatable, automated, and easy releases.
• Automate database changes using Liquibase or equivalent migration tools.
• Automate installed software and environment changes using Ansible or equivalent configuration management tools.
• Implement secure coding patterns, secrets management, authentication, authorization, and least-privilege controls.
• Introduce standard observability patterns, including structured logging, application metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and actionable health checks.
• Enhance exception handling, operational diagnostics, rollback procedures, and production-validation controls.
• Design or improve resilient deployment architectures, including hot-hot cross-datacenter deployments where required.
• Lead technical workshops and effectively communicate technical decisions, risks, blockers, trade-offs, and progress to engineering, security, architecture, operations, project management, and stakeholders.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, coaching, reusable standards, documentation, and knowledge transfer to development teams.
• Take ownership from initial assessment through implementation, production deployment, stabilization, and handover.

Skills

Must have

• The role demands extensive hands-on software engineering experience, with a focus on developing and maintaining production applications. Candidates must actively write and configure code, not merely oversee architecture or management tasks.
• Expertise in Java and JVM-based development is essential, while strong TypeScript skills are valued for Node.js-centric projects.
• Proficiency with the Spring ecosystem and modernizing Java enterprise applications is required.
• The candidate should demonstrate recent personal involvement in coding, debugging, and reviewing production code.
• Hard skills include practical experience in Test-Driven Development across multiple testing frameworks, with a solid understanding of various testing types such as unit, integration, and regression tests.
• The role involves creating automated test suites integrated within CI/CD pipelines, along with designing release automation and quality gates.
• Strong knowledge of secure coding practices, vulnerability remediation, and dependency risk management is necessary, including the ability to analyze application impacts before applying security fixes.
• Experience upgrading runtimes, frameworks, libraries, container platforms like Docker or OpenShift, and managing Linux environments—preferably Red Hat Enterprise Linux—is also important.
• Familiarity with build tools such as Maven, Gradle, or npm, advanced Git workflows, and comprehensive production-debugging techniques is expected.
• Candidates should understand application observability, exception handling, and production readiness, as well as fundamental distributed and critical system engineering principles.

Soft skills

• Focus on demonstrated ownership of complex technical work through all stages, from design to production handover.
• Strong client-facing communication is essential, including leading technical discussions, constructively challenging unsafe practices, and explaining trade-offs to diverse stakeholders.
• The ability to coach engineers and implement sustainable engineering standards without excessive customization is critical.
• Responsible and active use of AI coding tools to enhance engineering, testing, and delivery outcomes is also expected.

Nice to have

• Experience modernizing or migrating applications hosted on IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic, demonstrating familiarity with these platforms.
• Experience with major-version upgrades and migration from older versions of Spring or Spring Boot, indicating proficiency in framework transitions.
• Experience configuring continuous dependency-update tools such as Renovate or Dependabot, showing capability in automating dependency management.
• Experience with dependency reachability analysis, Software Composition Analysis, CVE assessment, and remediation of transitive dependencies, reflecting knowledge of software security and compliance.
• Experience automating database changes using Liquibase or Flyway, indicating skills in database migration automation.
• Experience using Ansible or equivalent configuration-management and deployment-automation tools, demonstrating proficiency in infrastructure automation.
• Strong experience in TypeScript, Node.js, and the npm ecosystem, highlighting development expertise in these technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes in addition to OpenShift, showing understanding of container orchestration platforms.
• Experience designing hot-hot, active-active, multi-region, or cross-datacenter deployment architectures, denoting knowledge of high-availability systems.
• Experience with resilience testing, disaster recovery, controlled failover, and production-recovery exercises, highlighting skills in system reliability and continuity planning.
• Experience with enterprise observability tools such as Splunk, ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, AppDynamics, or Dynatrace, reflecting proficiency in monitoring and diagnostics.
• Experience modernizing monolithic or legacy enterprise applications into maintainable systems.