Forward Deployed Engineer, London

We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation – the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore – it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this – hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more.

Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR.

As one of the first Forward Deployed Engineers at Meticulous, you'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our core engineering team at our London headquarters and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written – you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive; you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next.

Core Responsibilities

• You own each customer end-to-end – and do what’s needed to make sure Meticulous is transformational for them.
• Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them.
• Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on.
• Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership at each customer – driving scoping, integration, and rollout.
• Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: Work out what we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development.
• Build the playbook: You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last.

What We're Looking For

• Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ year of experience.
• Highly agentic: You have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked.
• Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives.
• Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites.

This role is not for you if…

• You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact.
• You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow.
• You expect regular hours and no travel.
• You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems.

You may look like…

• Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind.
• Ex‑founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder‑energy.
• Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier‑stage version of the same work.
• Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint.

What You'll Gain

• Help build a new function: You'll be instrumental in defining how this team operates.
• Exceptional growth: Collaborate with world-class engineers and learn from each other at a rapid pace.
• Expand your network: Work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies.
• Solve novel problems: Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design.
• World‑class compensation: Base salary £150K‑£300K plus significant equity.

Perks

• Unlimited food & drinks in office.
• A setup you’ll love: standing desk, brand new Macbook, ergonomic peripherals, and a £2k WFH budget.
• Team offsites: we work and play hard.
• Unlimited book budget: we encourage everyone to add to our growing in‑office library.

Life at Meticulous: We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future.