Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Willis Towers Watson; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Private healthcare

Pension scheme matched up to 10%

Volunteer day

Share scheme

Cycle-to-work

Job summary

Willis Towers Watson is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed AI Engineer to design and deliver AI-powered solutions within the Health, Wealth & Career segment. You will own the full lifecycle from architecture to deployment, embedding AI into real workflows and integrating enterprise systems.

You’ll work across product, data science, and architecture teams, mentoring engineers and driving measurable business value through scalable AI delivery.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in software engineering and technical leadership in enterprise-scale environments.
• Proven ability to design and deliver production AI-enabled applications and systems.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM workflows, and enterprise integration patterns.

Responsibilities

• Design and build AI-enabled applications, copilots, agents, extraction pipelines, and decision-support tools.
• Collaborate with business teams to translate workflows into scalable AI solutions.
• Ensure reliability, security, and operational readiness of AI platforms.

Skills

Enterprise software engineering

Technical leadership

AI/ML systems

Distributed systems

Tools

Anthropic Claude

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

LLM tooling

Job description

Description

We’re looking for a highly skilled Forward Deployed AI Engineer to join our Health, Wealth & Career (HWC) segment—where you’ll design and deliver cutting-edge AI solutions that solve complex, real-world business challenges and shape the future of work.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you’ll move beyond traditional development—partnering closely with stakeholders to translate ambiguous needs into scalable, AI-powered solutions that drive measurable value. You’ll own the full lifecycle—from architecture and build through to deployment and adoption—embedding AI into real workflows, integrating enterprise systems, and ensuring solutions are secure, reliable, and truly user-centric. Sitting close to the business, you’ll continuously refine solutions to maximise impact, efficiency, and adoption.

Why join us?

• At WTW, you’ll be part of our Health, Wealth & Career (HWC) segment—where we use data, technology, and deep expertise to shape the future of work.


• You’ll collaborate across multiple lines of business—such as Retirement, Health & Benefits, and Workforce Strategy—gaining exposure to diverse challenges and opportunities.


• As the role evolves, you’ll also help deliver innovative, AI-driven solutions directly to external clients, turning complex problems into scalable outcomes.


• Together, we’re creating more resilient, high-performing organizations—enhancing wellbeing, enabling better decisions, and driving sustainable business success at scale.


• This is a hybrid role, with the flexibility of remote working alongside occasional time in the office to build strong relationships and collaborate effectively with stakeholders.
  

The Role
This position is ideal for an experienced Staff Engineer, or Technical Lead with a strong enterprise engineering background and a passion for applying it to AI-enabled systems. You’ll bring deep expertise across modern full-stack technologies (.NET, Azure, SQL, React/Angular), along with experience in distributed systems, observability, and AI tooling such as LLMs, retrieval pipelines, agentic workflows, and platforms such as Anthropic Claude. Experience designing and deploying AI agents, leveraging Model Context Protocol (MCP), and orchestrating enterprise-grade AI solutions will be highly valued.

Acting as a bridge between business and technology, you’ll work across product, data science, architecture, and engineering teams, mentoring others, resolving production challenges, and scaling prototypes into robust, enterprise-grade solutions that deliver measurable business impact.

• AI solution delivery: Design and build AI-enabled applications, copilots, agents, extraction pipelines, prediction interfaces, and decision-support tools using foundation models, retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, and orchestration frameworks.


• Forward deployed problem solving: Work directly with business teams, product owners, clients, or operational users to understand real workflows, constraints, data quality issues, and adoption barriers, then translate these into working technical solutions.


• LLM and agent engineering: Build and tune LLM workflows, prompt strategies, schema-driven extraction, tool-calling patterns, agent orchestration, evaluation loops, and human-in-the-loop controls.


• Enterprise integration: Integrate AI solutions with enterprise systems, APIs, data platforms, document repositories, workflow tools, observability platforms, and identity and access management services.


• Production engineering: Ensure AI solutions meet enterprise standards for reliability, scalability, latency, maintainability, cost control, logging, monitoring, and operational support.


• Evaluation and quality assurance: Create evaluation datasets, test harnesses, validation tools, regression checks, and quality review workflows to measure accuracy, extraction quality, hallucination risk, and business usefulness.


• Architecture and technical leadership: Define solution architecture, engineering standards, reusable patterns, and implementation approaches for AI-enabled platforms and services.


• Data and knowledge readiness: Work with engineering, data, and business teams to prepare structured and unstructured data, improve metadata, design retrieval strategies, and identify gaps in source content.


• Security, privacy, and governance: Embed access controls, audit logging, data protection, responsible AI controls, security review, and compliance requirements into the AI delivery lifecycle.


• Adoption and enablement: Support users through demos, pilots, training, feedback loops, documentation, and iterative improvement so that deployed AI solutions create measurable business value.

Qualifications

What you'll bring

• Significant professional experience in software engineering, technical leadership, solutions architecture, or platform engineering, ideally in enterprise-scale environments.


• Proven ability to design and deliver production applications using modern engineering practices, including APIs, distributed systems, microservices, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and cloud platforms.


• Must have experience building and deploying agentic AI solutions using platforms such as Anthropic Claude, including AI agents, tool orchestration, reasoning workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and enterprise-scale automation use cases.


• Hands-on experience building AI-enabled systems, such as LLM pipelines, document extraction, structured output generation, AI-assisted analytics, prediction interfaces, or agentic workflows.


• Experience working with business-critical systems where reliability, maintainability, operational support, and measurable business impact are essential.


• Experience collaborating with data scientists, product managers, QA teams, architects, security teams, and senior stakeholders.


• Track record of mentoring engineers, leading technical delivery, establishing engineering standards, and influencing teams beyond direct line management.

What we offer

• 25 days of annual leave plus an extra WTW day to relax and recharge.


• Our comprehensive health and wellbeing offering includes private healthcare, life insurance, group income protection, and regular health assessments, all giving you peace of mind.


• Secure your future with our defined contribution pension scheme, featuring matched contributions up to 10% from the company.


• We support your growth and balance with hybrid working options, access to an employee assistance programme, and a fully paid volunteer day to make a difference in your community.


• On top of these, you can opt into a variety of additional perks including an electric vehicle car scheme, share scheme, cycle-to-work programme, dental and optical cover, critical illness protection, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer
We’re committed to equal employment opportunity and provide application, interview and workplace adjustments and accommodations to all applicants. If you foresee any barriers, from the application process through to joining WTW, please email [e-mail]