Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Stott and May; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Stott and May is seeking a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to join an early-stage AI-focused company in London. You will embed with client businesses to understand operations, identify automation opportunities, and deliver production-grade software that goes live quickly.

You will help build the core AI platform that scales across the group, while owning projects from discovery to deployment and iteration. This is a rare founder-level role with customer impact and platform ownership.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineer who can work independently and ship without hand-holding.
• Experience building real production systems.
• Strong product judgement and practical approach to solving problems.
• Confidence working with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfort with ambiguity, fast-moving environments and end-to-end ownership.
• Willingness to travel across the UK during active transformation projects.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with businesses to understand operational problems and identify opportunities for automation.
• Build and ship production software across full-stack applications, integrations, workflow automation and applied AI.
• Work with LLMs, agents, document generation, computer vision, data pipelines and legacy systems.
• Own projects from discovery and scoping through to deployment, adoption and iteration.
• Turn successful client solutions into reusable platform capabilities.
• Help shape the technical direction, platform architecture and future engineering team.

Skills

Software engineering

Production systems

Stakeholder communication

Autonomy

End-to-end ownership

Job description

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Join an early-stage applied AI company modernising safety-critical industries through automation, software and AI.

As technical hire #2, you’ll work directly with the CTO, embedding with acquired businesses to understand how they operate, identify high-impact problems and build solutions that go live quickly.

The role combines forward-deployed engineering with building the core AI platform that will scale across the wider group.

What you’ll be doing

• Working directly with businesses to understand operational problems and identify opportunities for automation
• Building and shipping production software across full-stack applications, integrations, workflow automation and applied AI
• Working with LLMs, agents, document generation, computer vision, data pipelines and legacy systems
• Owning projects from discovery and scoping through to deployment, adoption and iteration
• Turning successful client solutions into reusable platform capabilities
• Helping shape the technical direction, platform architecture and future engineering team

What they’re looking for

• A strong software engineer who can work independently and ship without hand-holding
• Experience building real production systems
• Strong product judgement and a practical approach to solving problems
• Confidence working with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort with ambiguity, fast-moving environments and end-to-end ownership
• Willingness to travel across the UK during active transformation projects

Experience in forward-deployed engineering, consulting, applied AI, cloud infrastructure or early-stage startups would be beneficial, but is not essential.

A rare opportunity to combine direct customer impact with founding-level ownership of the product, platform and future team.