Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2x on-site)

Type: Permanent, Full-time

SR2 is partnering with an exciting digital health technology company that works with pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare organisations to build AI and data-driven solutions addressing real-world challenges.

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer who combines strong software engineering with hands-on experience building modern AI and agentic applications.

This is a builder-first role working closely with clients and product teams, take ambiguous problems, turn them into something concrete and then build, deploy and own the solution end-to-end.

What you'll be doing

• Work directly with business, technical and product stakeholders to understand complex problems and determine what should be built.
• Rapidly turn ideas into working prototypes and production applications.
• Build full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents and multi-step workflows.
• Develop primarily with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Build agentic applications using technologies such as LangGraph, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK and OpenAI Assistants.
• Integrate Claude, GPT, Gemini and open-weight models with external tools, data and systems.
• Work with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and custom connectors.
• Build RAG and retrieval pipelines using vector databases such as Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate and pgvector.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure AI accuracy, reliability, latency and cost.
• Use modern AI development tools including Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Codex.
• Deploy and own applications in production across AWS, Azure, Cloudflare or Vercel.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, testing, security and observability.
• Demo working software directly to stakeholders and iterate quickly based on feedback.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years' relevant experience building production applications using AI / agentic development approaches.
• Strong commercial experience with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents, rather than only working with prompted LLMs.
• Experience connecting models to tools and creating multi-step agentic workflows.
• Strong understanding of modern LLMs and Generative AI.
• Experience with RAG, vector databases and retrieval pipelines.
• Practical experience building and using AI evaluation harnesses.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including OOP, SOLID, clean architecture and microservices.
• Experience deploying applications into cloud environments.
• Understanding of TDD, CI/CD, security, scalability and observability.
• Confidence working directly with stakeholders and turning ambiguous requirements into working software.
• Evidence of things you've recently built - whether commercially, through GitHub, open-source projects, side projects or your own products.
• A degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related technical discipline.

Nice to have

• Healthcare or life-sciences experience.
• MLOps and model-serving experience.
• Data pipeline experience with technologies such as Spark, Airflow, Beam or Glue.
• Public writing, talks or contributions around AI engineering.
• Relevant AWS or cloud certifications.

Why consider it?

• Build at the forefront of AI and agentic software engineering.
• Take genuine ownership from problem discovery through to production.
• Work directly with clients rather than being several layers removed from the problem.
• Build technology tackling meaningful challenges across healthcare and life sciences.
• Join an organisation investing in its growing UK engineering capability.
• Work alongside experienced international engineering, product and technology teams.
• Competitive compensation and opportunities for continued development.