Principal Forward Deployed Engineer in London

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer Contract | Outside IR35 | London, Hybrid | DV Cleared This is a contract role, 6 months with a view to extend, Outside IR35, with the day rate to be confirmed. It is hybrid, with 2 to 3 days a week on site in London plus travel to customer sites, requires active DV clearance, and starts ASAP. About the Client Morela is proud to be supporting a fast-growing, venture-backed UK AI company building sovereign AI for defence, government and other highly regulated sectors. Their core product is an AI operating system built for secure, air-gapped environments. The client’s identity will be shared on introduction. The Role You will own the technical relationship with the client’s defence and government customers, taking a GCP-native product and getting it deployed, integrated, tested and accredited in whatever environment the customer runs, from Kubernetes and OpenShift to bare metal and air-gapped networks. From the first workshop with a security authority through to acceptance and handover, it’s yours. It suits a former technical founder or Principal Engineer who still writes code and is comfortable working independently with senior MOD stakeholders. Responsibilities • Lead technical workshops, demos and discussions with senior MOD, engineering and security stakeholders • Own delivery end to end, from requirements and planning through deployment, troubleshooting and handover • Adapt the platform’s GCP architecture to each customer’s infrastructure, including restricted and air-gapped environments • Integrate the platform with customer data sources, APIs and systems • Own test strategy, acceptance and the technical documentation customers and accreditors need • Lead technical assurance, including architecture reviews, threat modelling and accreditation support • Write production code where delivery needs it and feed field insight back to engineering Essential Requirements • Active DV clearance • Has personally architected, built and scaled complex products from scratch, and is still hands-on • Strong GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, IAM, networking, Workload Identity Federation) • Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Docker and container orchestration • Deploying across Kubernetes, OpenShift, VMs, bare metal, on-premises and sovereign cloud • Full stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, PostgreSQL • Security engineering, test strategy and accreditation-grade documentation • Confident leading technical engagements with senior stakeholders, with a pragmatic, high-ownership delivery mindset Desirable Experience • MOD or defence delivery, including air-gapped or classified environments • Familiarity with MOD standards, information assurance and accreditation • AI/LLM engineering, including agentic workflows and evaluation • Data engineering and integration with complex customer data • AWS or Azure, GPU workloads or on-premise model serving Working Environment Some work takes place in secure facilities without personal devices or internet access. You will be part of a small, senior team working at the front line of sovereign AI in defence. Please contact (url removed)