Forward Deployed Applications - Software Engineer (Hiring Immediately) in London

About us

PhysicsX is a deep-tech company with roots in numerical physics and Formula One, dedicated to accelerating hardware innovation at the speed of software. We are building an AI-driven simulation software stack for engineering and manufacturing across advanced industries. By enabling high-fidelity, multi-physics simulation through AI inference across the entire engineering lifecycle, PhysicsX unlocks new levels of optimization and automation in design, manufacturing, and operations — empowering engineers to push the boundaries of possibility. Our customers include leading innovators in Aerospace & Defense, Materials, Energy, Semiconductors, and Automotive.

The Role

PhysicsX is building a new category of engineering software — one where physics AI models don't just augment existing workflows, but fundamentally redefine what's possible in design and operations. Our Product team is expanding a portfolio of Engineering Applications that bring this capability directly to the engineers, scientists, and operators who need it most. If you're excited by the challenge of turning cutting-edge AI and simulation research into tools that change how the world's most complex engineering problems get solved, this is the team to do it with.

You’ll join the Forward Deployed Applications team, a group that sits at the intersection of product development and customer delivery. Your primary mission is to work closely with customers on real engineering problems — and to turn what you learn into generalised, reusable product capabilities that raise the ceiling for every PhysicsX user. This isn’t a traditional customer-facing role or a pure product role: it’s the feedback loop that keeps our product grounded in genuine engineering value. You’ll work alongside simulation engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and backend developers, with significant autonomy in how you approach problems, and a direct line of influence over the direction of our growing application suite.

What you will do

• You’ll spend meaningful time in conversations — with users unpacking real engineering workflows, with Delivery teams translating those needs into concrete requirements, and with the Product team debating which patterns are worth generalising. Expect to be a connector as much as a builder, and to develop a strong instinct for which customer insights have product-wide implications.
• You’ll be expected to bring both rigour and initiative: writing clean, well-considered code, contributing to architecture decisions, and pushing back constructively when a bespoke solution risks diverging from the product vision. This team operates with a high degree of autonomy, and the expectation is that you use it thoughtfully.
• On any given day you might be designing a 3D visualisation that makes a fluid dynamics simulation instantly legible to a non-specialist, building a React interface that surfaces AI model outputs in a live operational context, or refactoring a one-off delivery prototype into something the whole platform can build on. The problems are genuinely novel, and the solutions you build here will define what engineering software looks like next.
• Contribute to a positive team culture through active participation, clear communication of progress and blockers, constructive code reviews, mentoring of junior engineers, and effective cross-functional collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to continuous development by seeking feedback, staying current with technology trends, sharing knowledge through guilds and documentation, and building expertise across multiple technical areas.
• Take initiative in breaking down complex problems, evaluating trade-offs, documenting technical decisions, and strategically addressing technical debt while balancing short-term delivery with long-term vision and business context.
• Write clean, maintainable code following established standards, implement comprehensive testing strategies across the test pyramid, apply secure coding practices and stay current with security threats, and build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes with confidence.
• Gather requirements and collaborate with stakeholders to define scope, design systems and interfaces that balance functional and non-functional requirements, document technical decisions clearly, and identify and resolve performance bottlenecks through profiling and optimisation.
• Travel to customer sites in North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, for an average of 3-4 weeks per quarter, where you’ll collaborate closely with customers to build solutions on-site.

What you bring to the table

• Effectively leverage frameworks and concurrency primitives, contribute to service interface design using patterns such as Protobuf and OpenAPI, develop composable client libraries with code-generation tooling, and ensure service availability through throttling, rate-limiting, and standard resilience techniques.
• Write clear and effective SQL with an understanding of database implementation trade-offs, leverage caching, memoisation, and messaging systems such as AMQP or NATS, and understand service discovery, schema drift mitigation, and the principles of 12-factor apps.
• Create API tests using mock services, contribute to service documentation, understand authentication flows and middleware patterns, and contrast architectural approaches such as REST, RPC, gRPC, and GraphQL to make informed design decisions.
• Build responsive web applications using modern frameworks such as React, Vue, or Angular, effectively translate graphic designs to web interfaces with semantic HTML, and develop reusable UI components that maintain design system consistency with a strong understanding of UX practices.
• Write clean type annotations and leverage generics to add type safety across API responses and external data, manage client-server state synchronisation with optimistic updates, and effectively use frontend build tools and bundlers such as Webpack, Vite, or Rollup.
• Understand the browser rendering model and JavaScript execution to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, leverage methods, caching headers, CORS, and status codes effectively, and implement security mitigations for CSRF, XSS, and authentication using cookies and local storage.
• Confidence working across the full stack — you’re at home reasoning about frontend architecture in React and TypeScript as well as backend design in Python, and you understand the tradeoffs in both well enough to make and defend pragmatic decisions.
• Experience building on top of large, established codebases — you know how to move deliberately, contribute incrementally, and improve things without breaking them.
• A track record of delivering in customer-facing or time-pressured environments, with the judgement to know when to ship something fit for purpose now and when to push back in the interest of a more durable solution.
• The instinct to treat customer engagements as a source of product insight — you naturally ask why a workflow exists, not just how to support it, and you channel that curiosity into constructive, well-reasoned feedback to product teams.
• Familiarity with 2D and 3D data visualisation and the ability to make complex simulation or model outputs legible and useful to non-specialist users.
• An agile, collaborative working style — you engage seriously with code review, testing, and CI/CD, and you’re as invested in the quality of your team’s output as your own.

What we offer

• Equity options – share in our success and growth.
• 10% employer pension contribution – invest in your future.
• Free office lunches – great food to fuel your workdays.
• Flexible working – balance your work and life in a way that works for you.
• Hybrid setup – enjoy our new Shoreditch office while keeping remote flexibility.
• Enhanced parental leave – support for life’s biggest milestones.
• Private healthcare – comprehensive coverage.
• Personal development – access learning and training to help you grow.
• Work from anywhere – extend your remote setup to enjoy the sun or reconnect with loved ones.

We value diversity and are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, age, sexual orientation or gender identity. We strongly encourage individuals from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech to apply. To help make a change, we sponsor bright women from disadvantaged backgrounds through their university degrees in science and mathematics.

We collect diversity and inclusion data solely for the purpose of monitoring the effectiveness of our equal opportunities policies and ensuring compliance with UK employment and equality legislation. This information is confidential, used only in aggregate form, and will not influence the outcome of your application.