Forward Deployed Engineer

Findrs; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Findrs is a fast-growing AI engineering company that embeds small technical teams inside client organisations. You will act as the technical lead on client projects, moving between deep coding work and communicating with non-technical stakeholders to turn ambiguous problems into production AI systems.

You’ll own the outcome from start to finish, designing architectures, building integrations, and shipping initial versions quickly while iterating with real user feedback.

Qualifications

• Strong grounding in software engineering across the full development lifecycle.
• Experience with AI tooling and model integration is a plus.
• Able to talk to non-technical stakeholders and translate needs into technical action.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical lead on client projects.
• Design architecture for new systems and build integrations, evaluations and deployment infrastructure.
• Ship initial versions quickly and iterate based on real user feedback.
• Work closely with founders and operators to understand and solve business problems.

Skills

Software engineering

AI systems design

Client communication

Job description

But can you walk into a business, understand a problem that nobody has properly defined yet, work out where AI can genuinely make a difference, and then build the thing?

Because that’s what this role is really about.

You’ll join a fast-growing AI engineering company that embeds small technical teams directly inside its clients.

You won’t spend months working from a perfectly written product specification.

Instead, you’ll sit close to founders, operators and senior stakeholders, understand how their business actually works, identify where technology can create leverage, and turn ambiguous problems into production AI systems.

You’ll own the outcome from beginning to end.

What will you actually be doing?

You’ll act as the technical lead on client projects.

That means you could be:

• Sitting with a founder trying to understand why a critical internal workflow takes three days.
• Working out whether AI is actually the right answer.
• Designing the architecture for a new system.
• Building integrations, evaluations and deployment infrastructure.
• Shipping an initial version quickly.
• Watching how real users interact with it.
• Iterating until it genuinely solves the problem.

You’ll be expected to move comfortably between engineering and communication.

One minute you might be deep in the codebase.

The next, you’ll be explaining to a non-technical stakeholder what you’ve built, why you’ve built it that way, and what needs to happen next.

You won’t simply receive tickets.

You’ll help decide what the tickets should be.

This could suit you if…

You’re an engineer who likes building things more than talking about building things.

You’re already experimenting with frontier AI models and tooling because you’re genuinely curious about what they can do.

You understand that models are powerful, but you also understand their limitations.

You probably have side projects, prototypes, products or experiments sitting in your GitHub that nobody asked you to build.

You enjoy starting with a blank page.

You’re comfortable making decisions without having every requirement defined for you.

And importantly, you can talk to people.

You don’t need a Product Manager translating every conversation between you and the client.

You’re happy sitting in a room with founders or senior operators, asking intelligent questions and turning what you hear into something that works.

Your background

You’ll need a strong grounding in software engineering and be comfortable operating across the full development lifecycle.

You might already be an AI Engineer, Software Engineer, Founding Engineer, Solutions Engineer or Forward Deployed Engineer.

Your exact title matters less than what you’ve actually built.

Having created something yourself is a major advantage.

That could be:

• A startup.
• A software product.
• An AI model or application.
• A consultancy.
• A side project with real users.

What matters is that you know what it feels like to take something from an idea to something people actually use.

Because you’ll get exposure to a range of genuinely difficult AI problems rather than spending years maintaining one narrow product area.

You’ll work directly with clients.

You’ll have significant autonomy.

And you’ll see the systems you build being used in real businesses, rather than disappearing into an endless backlog.

This is a remote-first position, although you’ll need to be comfortable travelling into London for client meetings and on-site work when required.

If you want a role where you’re given a tightly defined specification and told exactly what to build, this probably isn’t it.

If you want to be the person who figures out what should be built in the first place, then builds it, this could be a very good fit.