Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed | AI-First Engineering

About the Client

A global software organisation specialising in acquiring, strengthening and growing vertical market software businesses across a wide range of industries. They operate a large international portfolio of established software companies, providing them with the expertise, resources and long-term support to grow and evolve.

With AI fundamentally changing the way software is developed, they are investing in a specialist AI Transformation team to help its businesses adopt AI-first engineering practices, modernise their technology and significantly improve software delivery.

The team has already demonstrated the impact of this approach across several businesses and is now scaling its transformation initiatives across the wider portfolio.

The Opportunity

This isn't a traditional software engineering role, nor is it simply about introducing developers to AI coding tools. It's about going directly into businesses, understanding their challenges and using AI, modern engineering practices and hands-on technical leadership to fundamentally improve how they operate.

You'll operate in a forward-deployed capacity, embedding yourself within different software businesses to identify challenges, solve complex engineering problems and drive meaningful transformation. You'll have the autonomy to assess what's needed, challenge existing approaches and take ownership of delivering solutions.

Your work could involve:

• Working directly with engineering leaders, technical teams and business stakeholders to understand their challenges.
• Identifying opportunities to improve software delivery, modernise legacy systems and remove engineering bottlenecks.
• Applying AI-assisted development, agentic workflows and automation to solve real engineering problems.
• Leading hands-on technical initiatives, from initial discovery through to implementation and delivery.
• Influencing stakeholders, gaining buy-in and helping engineering teams adopt AI-first ways of working.
• Experimenting with emerging AI technologies and turning successful approaches into scalable, repeatable practices.
• Driving measurable improvements in engineering productivity, software quality and delivery speed.

What We're Looking For

We're interested in experienced software engineers and technical leaders who combine strong hands-on engineering capability with the confidence to influence people and drive change.

Ideally, you'll bring:

• A strong software engineering background, with experience designing, building and delivering complex systems.
• Practical experience using AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or similar technologies.
• Experience with agentic AI, autonomous development workflows and the future of software engineering.
• Experience working directly with stakeholders to understand problems and deliver solutions.
• The ability to communicate technical concepts clearly and influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A proactive, problem-solving mindset and the confidence to operate independently in unfamiliar environments.
• Experience leading technical initiatives, introducing new ways of working or driving engineering improvements.

Why This Opportunity?

This is an opportunity to join a growing team operating with a startup mentality, backed by a large, established global software organisation.

You'll gain exposure to different businesses, technologies and engineering challenges, with the freedom to experiment, innovate and make a genuine impact.

Rather than working on the same product or codebase every day, you'll be solving different problems, collaborating with different teams and helping shape how AI-first software engineering is adopted at scale.

We're looking for engineers who don't just want to use AI to write code faster, but want to fundamentally change how software is built.