Head of Artificial Intelligence in London

AI / Financial Technology / Enterprise Software

• 3 days on-site - Central London

I'm supporting an early-stage AI startup building intelligent financial products for enterprise customers.

The company is developing AI-powered software that helps large organisations manage complex financial workflows, analyse information and make better decisions. Its products operate within data-sensitive and regulated environments, where security, reliability and successful integration are essential.

They are now hiring a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering to establish and lead the function responsible for deploying their technology across strategic enterprise customers.

The opportunity

As Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, you will sit at the intersection of engineering, product and customer delivery.

You will work directly with enterprise customers to understand their financial workflows, technical environments and commercial objectives. You will then lead the design, development and deployment of tailored AI solutions built on top of the company’s core platform.

This is not a conventional implementation or professional services position. You will be expected to remain technically hands-on, solve complex engineering problems and influence the direction of the product.

Initially, you will personally lead key customer deployments. As the company grows, you will recruit and manage a high-performing team of Forward Deployed Engineers.

What you will do

• Own the technical delivery of AI products across strategic enterprise customers.
• Lead projects from initial discovery and technical scoping through to production deployment.
• Translate complex financial workflows into practical technical solutions.
• Design integrations with customer data, systems, APIs and infrastructure.
• Ensure deployments meet enterprise requirements around security, reliability and scalability.
• Establish clear delivery plans, technical milestones and measures of success.
• Identify risks early and take ownership of resolving technical blockers.

Build customer-specific AI solutions

• Develop production-ready applications using the company’s core AI platform.
• Work across backend services, data pipelines, APIs, cloud infrastructure and AI integrations.
• Design and implement LLM, retrieval and agentic workflows for financial use cases.
• Build evaluation, monitoring and feedback systems for production AI applications.
• Adapt solutions to different customer environments without creating unmanageable technical debt.
• Balance rapid delivery with maintainability, security and long-term product strategy.

Shape the product

• Act as the technical link between customers and the core product organisation.
• Identify recurring customer requirements that should become platform capabilities.
• Feed insights from deployments into the company’s engineering and product roadmap.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams to improve the scalability and usability of the platform.
• Help determine when requirements should be solved through configuration, integration or core product development.
• Contribute to technical and commercial decisions around new customers and use cases.

Build the Forward Deployed Engineering function

• Define the operating model for Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Recruit, develop and lead the initial team.
• Establish delivery standards, technical documentation and reusable deployment playbooks.
• Create an effective approach to resource planning across customer projects.
• Develop a culture of ownership, pace, technical quality and customer empathy.
• Remain close to customer work and the code as the team grows.

Support commercial growth

• Partner with the founders and commercial team during technical discovery and solution design.
• Contribute to enterprise sales conversations, demonstrations and proof-of-concept projects.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to engineering teams, customer stakeholders and senior executives.
• Build trusted relationships with technical and non-technical customer teams.
• Help evaluate whether prospective customer requirements are technically and commercially viable.

What they are looking for

• Strong hands-on software engineering experience, ideally across backend or full-stack development.
• Experience designing, building and deploying production software.
• Practical experience with modern AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG, agents, embeddings or model orchestration.
• Experience delivering technically complex products into enterprise customers.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, data integrations and cloud infrastructure.
• The ability to move comfortably between customer discovery, architecture and implementation.
• Experience working with security-conscious, regulated or data-sensitive organisations.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical decisions affect customer outcomes.
• Experience leading engineers or the clear potential to build and manage a technical team.
• Comfort operating within an early-stage environment where priorities can change quickly.
• A willingness to remain hands-on rather than operating purely as a people manager.

Particularly relevant experience

The following would be useful, although not essential:

• Previous experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering or Professional Services Engineering.
• Building or leading a customer-facing engineering function.
• Experience at an enterprise AI, fintech or financial software company.
• Delivering products into banks, insurers, investment firms or large corporate finance teams.
• Designing secure, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Working with Python, TypeScript or comparable backend technologies.
• Deploying systems across AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Integrating with enterprise data platforms and financial systems.
• Building evaluation and observability frameworks for production AI.
• Supporting technical sales, proofs of concept or enterprise procurement processes.

This role may not suit you if

• You are looking for a purely managerial position.
• You prefer working only on a central platform without direct customer interaction.
• Your experience is focused on demonstrations or prototypes rather than production deployments.
• Build and lead a critical engineering function from the ground up.
• Work directly with the founders and influence company strategy.
• Own some of the company’s most important enterprise deployments.
• Shape how advanced AI is applied to commercially valuable financial use cases.
• Influence both the core product and the customer delivery model.
• Join at an early stage with significant scope for ownership and progression.
• Recruit and develop a high-performing Forward Deployed Engineering team.
• Receive a competitive package, including meaningful equity.

The company is less concerned with exact job titles than with technical capability, customer judgement and ownership.

You may already be leading a Forward Deployed Engineering or Solutions Engineering team. Alternatively, you could be a senior software engineer, AI engineer or technical delivery leader who has repeatedly taken ownership of complex enterprise deployments.

What matters is that you can understand a customer’s problem, design the right technical approach, build the solution and establish a team capable of repeating that success at scale.

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