Forward Deployed Engineer

HelmGuard; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

EMI options

Team lunch

Roof terrace

On-site showers

AI tooling budgets

Job summary

HelmGuard is building agent-native risk infrastructure and is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own enterprise accounts end-to-end from day one. You’ll partner with the CTO and work directly with CSOs, VPs of Risk, and heads of compliance to translate business needs into platform improvements.

You’ll run meetings, configure deployments, and drive adoption across a dozen-plus accounts, with EMI-eligible equity and top-London-market compensation. This is a founding-team style role in London.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of experience doing something hard and impressive.
• Real commercial instinct: you've sold, negotiated, or owned customer outcomes you can point to.
• Comfort being the single point of accountability when something is on fire.

Responsibilities

• Own strategic accounts: adoption, expansion, renewal, the whole thing.
• Run weekly working sessions with senior stakeholders; drive the agenda, close the loop.
• Configure the platform to fit each customer's reality.
• Manage the async cadence: emails, follow-ups, status updates, internal escalations.
• Translate customer needs into prioritized product feedback that changes the roadmap.
• Hold your own in procurement, security review, and contract conversations.
• Ship code with Claude Code. When a customer needs a UI fix or a bug, you ship.

Skills

Customer-facing

Enterprise software

Account ownership

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

React

Tailwind

OpenAPI

Express

Azure

Postgres

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Docker

Job description

About HelmGuard

We're building agent-native risk infrastructure: risk management and trust building, delivered by AI agents, for a world increasingly run by them. As more decisions and transactions run through agents, the volume of risk to manage and trust to establish is growing very fast. Today both functions are fragmented, split across internal teams, point products, and outside consultants, and rebuilt from scratch whenever someone needs an answer. HelmGuard brings them onto one platform and runs them continuously: our agents sit on top of proprietary data and reassess as conditions change, rather than at fixed checkpoints. So our customers spend their time deciding and acting on what matters, not assembling the evidence to get there.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent across risk management and trust building annually. These funds are going to be reallocated to agent-native solutions in the next five years, and we will capture that spend.

We've grown to seven-figure revenue within months of product launch, on the back of multi-year contracts with leading enterprises in financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare. Our founders come from Palantir and academic institutions: Oxford, Stanford, and ETH. We're backed by leading UK and US institutional investors and exceptions angels from Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Palantir, SpaceXAI, and more.

We're hiring across founding-team roles for people who want outsize impact, the influence over direction and culture that comes only from joining this early, and pre-Series A equity upside.

Your Impact

In this role, you'll be the critical node for our platform's adoption. Once a customer signs, it's on you to make them successful. You’ll expand the relationship, and turn each account into a reference customer that defines how we sell to everyone who comes after. The customers you make successful in year one become the basis of everything we build in year three.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you own our enterprise accounts end-to-end and get your hands dirty with related development. You're the first person our customers call and their trusted counterpart. You sit across the table from CSOs, VPs of Risk, heads of compliance, and you turn their messiest workflows into something that runs on our platform.

Our platform is user-friendly, but we find great value in staying close to customers and understanding their needs. Expect roughly one to two customer meetings per week per account, plus the async work around it, driving adoption, configuring the platform, chasing requirements, helping decide what features to implement and implementing them, keeping things moving. You'll own a dozen plus accounts at any given time.

This is the closest thing we have to a founding-team role outside the founders. You’ll be partnering directly with our CTO to help shape what the company becomes.

What You Will Do

• Own strategic accounts: adoption, expansion, renewal, the whole thing

• Run weekly working sessions with senior stakeholders; drive the agenda, close the loop

• Configure the platform to fit each customer's reality

• Manage the async cadence: emails, follow-ups, status updates, internal escalations

• Translate customer needs into prioritized product feedback that actually changes the roadmap

• Hold your own in procurement, security review, and contract conversations

• Ship code with Claude Code. When a customer needs a UI fix, a small feature, or a bug squashed, you do it. You don't need to be an engineer today, but you need to want to ship by month three. We'll teach you.

You Probably Have

• 2–5 years of experience doing something hard and impressive

• Real commercial instinct: you've sold, negotiated, or owned customer outcomes in a way you can point to

• Comfort being the single point of accountability when something is on fire

Bonus

• Solutions architect, deployment strategist, customer engineer, or similar background at a technical enterprise company

• Experience at a Series A/B enterprise startup (GRC, cyber or legal tech in particular)

• Background in risk, compliance, or financial services

• Experience in software development

Culture and Values

We value a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We also hold a small set of core beliefs that reflect how we operate, and share them transparently with candidates so the fit is clear from the outset.

Put Customers First. Our customers buy outcomes from us, not features. We judge every decision by whether it delivers on that promise.

Take Ownership. Founding-stage means problems don't come pre-scoped. You see something that needs doing, scope it, ship it, own the outcome. We expect this from everyone, and provide you the backing to execute on it.

Work Hard, With Gratitude. This is the most consequential window for building enterprise software in a generation. We work hard because the opportunity is rare, and we do it with gratitude for the moment, for the people we get to build it with, and for the customers willing to bet on us this early.

Say the Silly Thing. The best ideas usually start out sounding half-baked, so we'd rather you say the silly thing than sit on it. We want you opinionated and willing to argue, and just as willing to change your mind when someone makes a better case. Disagreement here is a contribution, not a risk.

Working at HelmGuard

Location. King's Cross, London (Gridiron building). We're built around in-person collaboration and expect most days to be in-office, with flexibility for the days that need it.

Compensation. Top decile for the London market, with meaningful EMI-eligible options.

Perks. Daily team lunch and specialty coffee, a roof terrace overlooking King's Cross, on-site showers for those who enjoy active commuting, and serious per-engineer AI tooling and API budgets.

Interview process. Three stages: behavioural phone screen, commercial-technical phone screen, and a paid on-site work trial. Target turnaround is under two weeks from first conversation.

Tech Stack. TypeScript, Node.js, React, Tailwind, OpenAPI, Express, Azure (Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID), Postgres, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker. Anthropic-first AI with in-house evals and scaffolding. Claude Code throughout.