Frontline AI Engineer: Deploying Production-Ready Services

IFS; Staines-upon-Thames; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer, R&D AI Services, to embed with product teams and translate business needs into AI-powered solutions. You will drive technical discovery, design AI-first applications, and build new AI services when gaps exist.

The role is hands-on and requires strong Python, cloud, and MLOps skills, with a focus on delivering production-grade systems. You will work across data pipelines, model serving, and orchestration tooling, ensuring scalable, observable, and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with hands-on production systems.
• Strong Python and cloud-native skills and willingness to work across stacks.
• Experience integrating LLMs and AI services into production applications.
• Hands-on with data pipelines, model serving, and MLOps tooling.
• Excellent ability to communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly with product teams to understand business flows and identify AI opportunities.
• Lead technical discovery to separate bottlenecks from symptoms in processes.
• Design and build AI-first applications on top of existing AI services or scope new ones.
• Develop data pipelines, model training/serving, and MLOps tooling for solutions.
• Ship first version quickly, then harden with monitoring and reliability.

Skills

Python

Cloud & Kubernetes

AI & LLM integration

Agentic systems

Retrieval & RAG

APIs & enterprise integration

Deployment & IaC

Data & storage

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Azure AKS

Blob Storage

Key Vault

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

ArgoCD

GitOps

Job description

IFS is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer, R&D AI Services, to embed with product teams and translate business needs into AI-powered solutions. You will drive technical discovery, design AI-first applications, and build new AI services when gaps exist.

The role is hands-on and requires strong Python, cloud, and MLOps skills, with a focus on delivering production-grade systems. You will work across data pipelines, model serving, and orchestration tooling, ensuring scalable, observable, and