Forward Deployed Engineer

Mbnsolutions; Greater London; On-site; GBP 160,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive equity

On-site in London

Up to 25% travel

Job summary

MBN Solutions is partnering with an ambitious startup to build an early Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function in London. You’ll own the journey from initial technical conversations to successful production deployments, writing production code and turning learnings into improvements.

As an early FDE team member, you’ll shape the playbook, the tooling, and engineering practices around customer delivery while collaborating across time zones and with clients.

Qualifications

• Typically three to eight years of demanding software engineering experience.
• Strong algorithmic and logical reasoning.
• Ability to navigate unfamiliar codebases and solve difficult bugs.
• Experience in customer-facing engineering, deployments and pilots.
• Computer science degree from a leading university or deep coding experience.
• Persistence and ownership to progress through ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Technical discovery, pilots, integrations and production rollouts.
• Hands-on debugging and development across complex customer environments.
• Product improvements addressing deployment challenges and benefiting other customers.
• Reusable tooling, documentation and the emerging FDE playbook.
• Multiple customer engagements with careful follow-through for deployments.

Skills

Software engineering

Algorithms

Debugging

Customer-facing engineering

Open-source contributions

Education

Computer science degree

Job description

A role for builders with a founder’s mentality.

You’ve built through ambiguity, solved difficult engineering problems and taken responsibility for getting something into production. You want that same ownership in your next role, with the opportunity to influence the product, work directly with customers and help build a team’s approach from the beginning.

This is an opportunity to join an early Forward Deployed Engineering function and help write its playbook.

The company

MBN Solutions is partnering with an ambitious technology startup building the infrastructure to help engineering teams ship reliable software at the speed AI makes possible.

As AI accelerates software development, reliable testing becomes increasingly important. The company is building technology to help engineering teams keep pace.

Your opportunity to build

You’ll own the journey from an initial technical conversation to a successful production deployment.

You’ll write production code and turn what you learn into improvements that make future deployments better.

As an early member of the FDE team, you’ll also help establish how it operates: the tools it uses, the way it runs pilots and the engineering practices it builds around customer delivery.

What you’ll own

• Technical discovery, pilots, integrations and production rollouts.
• Hands-on debugging and development across complex customer environments.
• Product improvements that address deployment challenges and benefit other customers.
• Technical relationships with senior engineers and engineering leaders.
• Reusable tooling, documentation and the emerging FDE playbook.
• Multiple customer engagements, including the detailed follow-through needed to make deployments successful.

A founder or account executive will partner with you on the account and handle pricing and contracts. You’ll own technical delivery.

Who we’re looking for

You’ll need at least one deeply technical, demanding role at a high-growth startup. You may have been a founding engineer, a technical founder or an early engineer with substantial responsibility for building and shipping the product.

The team is looking for evidence of exceptional ability: a standout technical achievement, a strong academic or engineering background, a hackathon win, meaningful open-source work or a product you played a central role in building.

You should bring:

• Typically three to eight years of demanding software engineering experience, with substantial recent production coding.
• Strong algorithmic and logical reasoning, including the ability to solve coding problems under interview conditions.
• Confidence navigating unfamiliar codebases, investigating difficult bugs and working through complex systems.
• Experience in, or a clear appetite for, customer-facing engineering, including integrations, deployments and technical pilots.
• A computer science degree from a leading university. Candidates without one will need compelling evidence of deep coding experience developed early, such as competitive programming or substantial open-source contributions.
• Persistence and ownership: the ability to make progress through ambiguity and stay with a difficult problem until it is resolved.

Experience building a product from scratch and helping it reach meaningful customer adoption or revenue would be particularly valuable.

The founder mentality

You take initiative. You care about whether what you build works for the customer. You can move between a technical discussion, a difficult debugging session and the practical work of getting a deployment over the line.

You’ll need to enjoy customer interaction as well as coding, and be comfortable with the repeatable integration and deployment work that sits alongside the more novel engineering challenges.

This is a demanding startup environment. The team and its customers span London, San Francisco and New York, so the role requires flexibility across time zones and periods of intensive delivery.

Why consider it?

You’ll combine substantial engineering work with direct responsibility for customer outcomes and the opportunity to shape an early function.

Your work can influence the codebase, the customer experience and how the FDE team grows. For someone who enjoys building from the beginning, it offers scope to create both the technical solutions and the practices others will use.

Package and commitment

• £160,000–£310,000 base, depending on experience and qualifications, plus competitive equity.
• On-site in London five days a week.
• Up to 25% travel to client sites.
• Flexibility to collaborate across time zones.

The interview process includes a collaborative coding exercise based on a real engineering problem, alongside assessment of algorithmic reasoning, debugging, technical depth and ownership.