Wanted: Consulting Director -Forward Deployed Engineering

We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future. As strategies, technologies, and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity. Our teams of interdisciplinary experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough technologies to progress further, faster. Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results. We are over 4,000 strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers, and technologists. And we have deep expertise in consumer and manufacturing, defence and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government and public services, health and life sciences, and transport. Our teams operate globally from offices across the UK, Ireland, US, Nordics, and Netherlands.

We challenge where it matters and own the outcome. We combine strategic thinking, customer-centric service design, and agile engineering practices to accelerate innovation in a tech-driven world.

Why consider joining as a Consulting Director?

• Join a team where you're trusted to shape your own path, manage your time, and influence real change for our clients and communities.
• Grow a flexible and unique career within a trust-based, inclusive environment that values excellence, innovation, and curiosity.
• Join other experts within our supportive and collaborative community through knowledge-sharing and peer-level support, coaching and mentoring.

What you can expect:

• Be part of our management team, helping shape and launch new service propositions while driving strategic business growth.
• Lead business development initiatives - building trusted client relationships, owning outcomes, and delivering innovative, high-impact solutions.
• Collaborate with FTSE 100 clients as a respected advisor, guiding them through complex challenges with clarity and creativity.
• Support your team’s growth through coaching, knowledge-sharing, and creating opportunities for them to thrive.
• Contribute to thought leadership and the development of market-relevant offerings that showcase innovation and deliver value to clients.
• Hybrid working with the team on client site or in our office a minimum of two days per week.

Our Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are embedded with strategic customers, lead end-to-end deployments of AI systems in production, and measure success through adoption and workflow impact rather than strategies. You will build this unit from scratch. You define the operating model, recruit the founding cohort, either internally or externally, stand up the model tooling, and land the first client deployments.

The role:

• Build and lead the FDE unit, from a founding cohort of 8 to 12 engineers to a 100 plus person team within 24 months.
• Design the operating model: embedded deployment structure, delivery cadence, eval-driven quality gates, and commercial packaging including outcome-linked pricing.
• Own the productivity thesis. Define the metrics, instrument every deployment, and publish evidence of the multiplier FDEs achieve against baseline.
• Support our client Partners and lead the first deployments in priority sectors: data centres, semiconductors, water, and energy infrastructure.
• Set the hiring bar. Recruit fellow FDE engineers who ship production systems, upskill and transition existing engineers into FDEs, codify their patterns into reusable tooling and playbooks, and build the training pathway.

What good looks like at 12 months:

• Three or more paying FDE deployments live, adopted by client users, with referenceable outcomes.
• A working DALM/SLM toolchain in production, with documented productivity gains of 3x or more against baseline.
• A founding team of 40 plus engineers, a hiring pipeline, and a repeatable eval-driven delivery method.
• At least 15 existing engineers transitioned into FDE roles through a defined upskilling pathway, with 80% certified as deployment-ready against the FDE skills matrix and at least 15 deployed on live client work.
• A commercial offer with published pricing and at least one outcome-linked contract signed.

Qualifications:

• A track record building and scaling engineering or applied AI teams, in consulting, a product company, an AI lab, or a venture environment.
• Hands-on credibility with modern AI engineering: LLM fine-tuning, RAG, agentic workflows, evaluation frameworks, and MLOps.
• Direct experience deploying small or domain-adapted models in enterprise settings, including cost, latency, security, and data residency trade-offs.
• Revenue ownership at £2-3m+, including shaping, pricing, and closing complex engagements.
• Sector exposure to asset-intensive industries is an advantage: infrastructure, utilities, advanced manufacturing, or semiconductors.
• The instincts of a builder. You want to create something, put your name on it, and be measured on production outcomes.

Why this role:

• Founder economics inside an established platform: existing clients, delivery infrastructure, and a global brand.
• A clear path to Partner tied to the growth of the unit you build.