Forward Deployed AI Engineer: Defence & National Security

Sellick Partnership; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Up to 25% bonus

Opportunity to work on advanced AI in‑

Job summary

Sellick Partnership is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer for an AI/Defence role in the UK. You will design, build and deploy sophisticated software and AI capabilities across Defence, Security and Resilience.

The role spans software engineering, backend, cloud infrastructure and AI/ML with direct customer collaboration. Ideal candidates have 7+ years delivering production-grade software, strong system design, and experience with AI agent frameworks and cloud infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience delivering production-grade software at scale.
• Strong system design skills for performance, reliability and cost.
• Experience with AI/ML capabilities and APIs.

Responsibilities

• Own backend, infrastructure and AI/ML platform components for mission deployments.
• Design, build and deploy scalable backend services, APIs and data pipelines.
• Work with multimodal data, including text, multimedia and geospatial sources.
• Develop AI-driven capabilities with agentic workflows and LLMs.
• Collaborate with AI/ML researchers to operationalise models for government environments.
• Ensure secure and resilient solutions meeting UK security standards.
• Travel to customer locations up to 20% when required.

Skills

System design

Software architecture

AI/ML

Container orchestration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

Sellick Partnership is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer for an AI/Defence role in the UK. You will design, build and deploy sophisticated software and AI capabilities across Defence, Security and Resilience.

The role spans software engineering, backend, cloud infrastructure and AI/ML with direct customer collaboration. Ideal candidates have 7+ years delivering production-grade software, strong system design, and experience with AI agent frameworks and cloud infrastructure.