Forward Deployed Builder

FDE Times; Nottingham; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Ema is hiring a Forward Deployed Builder to embed with customers across EMEA and North America, identifying high-value automation opportunities and delivering live agentic workflows. You’ll design demos, select architectures, and own deployments from initial sales conversations through production adoption.

You’ll travel and embed with clients, rotating between your home office and customer sites, with training provided before deployment and a leadership path into enterprise-scale automation.

Qualifications

• Technical enough to write code and build a real demo.
• Persuasive enough to read an audience and tie pain points to Ema’s value proposition.
• Product-minded enough to see chaotic processes and design streamlined flows.

Responsibilities

• Hunt for high-value automation opportunities inside customer operations.
• Design agentic flows, choosing agents, integrations, and human-in-the-loop points.
• Build a working demo that proves value for deployments or partner showcases.
• Win the technical conversation by addressing objections and demonstrating feasibility.
• Turn wins into live, production agentic workflows adopted by customers.

Skills

Coding ability

Storytelling

Product mindset

AI-first mindset

Tools

Agentic platform

Job description

Job Description

About Ema

Ema builds AI Employees for HR, IT and Finance. Our AI Employees take on the busy work across the employee experience, from recruiting, onboarding and benefits to IT support, invoice processing and payroll, so people can spend their time on work that needs them. Founded by former executives from Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and Okta, our team includes engineers from premier tech companies and graduates of Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and IITs.

We are backed by industry leading investors including Accel, Naspers/Prosus, Creaegis, Section32, and angels like Sheryl Sandberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in London, Bangalore and Vancouver, Ema is at the frontier of what Agentic AI can do in production. We ship real systems that run real business processes at scale.

The role

“The ideal forward deployed builder is a composite. Not a software engineer, not a product manager, not a solutions architect or a salesperson — but able to draw on any of these to solve the customer’s problems, in the customer’s building, on the customer’s timeline, against the customer’s data.”

Ema is building the Universal Agentic Control Plane — the layer where enterprises turn messy, human-run business processes into AI Employees that actually do the work. The platform is powerful. The bottleneck is people who can walk into a customer’s world, see what should be automated, and make it real.

That’s this role.

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Builder to embed inside our customers and partners, find the highest-value opportunities for agentic automation, solution them, build the demo, win the deal, and then stay to implement it in production. You go in alone, Rambo in the jungle, armed with your wits, your skills, and the most powerful agentic platform on the market. We’ll train you hard before you deploy. After that, the territory is yours.

This is not a support role behind an account team. You are the account team, the solutions architect, and the builder, compressed into one person on the ground. Very few people in the world are doing this today. You’d be among the first.

Where you’ll be

Embedded, in-person, where the work is. You’d work in rotational deployments between your home office and the customers you’re embedded with across EMEA and North America. That could mean six months in London, followed by another six in Bangalore, with six more in New York. If the idea of a rotating tour across EMEA and North America lights you up, keep reading.

What you’ll actually do

• Hunt for the work worth doing. Sit inside the customer’s operation, learn how they really run, and identify the processes where agentic automation creates outsized value — the ones everyone lives with but no one has fixed.
• Solution it. Take a tangled, real-world business process and design it into a clean, streamlined agentic flow on Ema. You’ll make the architecture calls: which agents, which integrations, where a human stays in the loop.
• Build the demo. Get your hands dirty and actually build a working demo — a proof that makes the value undeniable. For partner deployments, that demo becomes their showcase to their customers, so it has to be sharp.
• Win the technical conversation. Read the room in the moment that matters, own every technical objection, and prove the thing works. You’re the one who makes the solution undeniable — that’s how the deal gets won.
• Implement it. Turn the won deal into a live, production agentic workflow the customer trusts and adopts. You own the outcome from first conversation to real usage — not a slide, not a pilot that dies, but something running.

Who you are

We don’t care about a rigid list of years and titles. We care that you’re:

• Technical enough to write some code and use our agentic platform to build a real demo - not just talk about one.
• Persuasive enough to read an audience and weave a captivating story that ties their pain points to Ema’s value proposition.
• Product-minded enough to look at a chaotic business process and see the beautiful, streamlined agentic flow hiding inside it.
• AI-first enough in your day-to-day to drive the impact of ten people — putting agents to work instead of grinding harder.

Most people are strong in one of these. The rare ones are formidable in all four — or hungry enough to become so. That’s who we’re looking for.

The archetypes who would thrive in this role

• The Management Consultant who wrote code at some point in their life, misses building things, and wants to step into the agentic world for real.
• The Product Manager who’s tired of owning a sliver and wants to live the entire journey of solving a user’s problem - from the first sales conversation all the way to adoption.
• The Engineer who’s ready to leave the safety of a Jira backlog and learn to navigate the chaos of a live agentic transformation
• The Ex-Founder who’s shelved the startup for now and wants to keep their edge sharp - craving operational freedom in an entrepreneurial environment
• The Wildcard who fits none of the above, but has both the burning passion and the proven skill to deliver. If that’s you, make your case.

Why this role, why now

Agentic AI is the biggest shift in enterprise software in a generation, and the playbook for deploying it is being written right now — by a handful of people. This is your shot to be one of them: to build the muscle, own real outcomes at real companies across two continents, and come out the other side as one of the most capable operators in the agentic world.

We’ll make you deadly. Where you take it is up to you.

Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits.

Ema Unlimited is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or genetics.