Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineer

SR2 | Socially Responsible Recruitment | Certified B Corporation™; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

SR2 | Socially Responsible Recruitment | Certified B Corporation™ partners with a digital health tech company to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer. The role blends software engineering with hands-on AI agent development, building production apps and multi-step workflows.

You will work directly with clients and product teams to translate ambiguous problems into concrete solutions, deploying across cloud platforms and ensuring robust performance and security.

Qualifications

• 3+ years' relevant experience building production AI/agentic apps.
• Strong experience with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents beyond prompts.
• Experience connecting models to tools and building multi-step agentic workflows.
• Strong understanding of modern LLMs and Generative AI.
• Experience with RAG, vector databases and retrieval pipelines.
• Experience building and using AI evaluation harnesses.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals (OOP, SOLID, clean architecture, microservices).
• Experience deploying apps to cloud environments.
• Knowledge of TDD, CI/CD, security, scalability and observability.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous requirements into working software.
• Evidence of recent builds (GitHub/open-source/projects).
• Degree in CS, ML or related technical discipline.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with business, tech and product stakeholders to define what to build.
• Turn ideas into prototypes and production apps quickly.
• Build full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents and workflows.
• Develop mainly with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Create agentic apps using LangGraph, AutoGen and related tools.
• Integrate Claude, GPT, Gemini and open-weight models with tools and data.
• Work with MCP and custom connectors.
• Build RAG and retrieval pipelines using Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate, pgvector.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for AI accuracy and cost.
• Use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Codex.
• Deploy and own apps in AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, Vercel.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

AI agents

Agentic workflows

LLMs

RAG

Vector databases

AI evaluation

Software engineering

Cloud deployments

Testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or ML

Tools

LangGraph

AutoGen

Claude Agent SDK

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Codex

Job description

Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2x on-site)

Type: Permanent, Full-time

SR2 is partnering with an exciting digital health technology company that works with pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare organisations to build AI and data-driven solutions addressing real-world challenges.

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer who combines strong software engineering with hands-on experience building modern AI and agentic applications.

This is a builder-first role working closely with clients and product teams, take ambiguous problems, turn them into something concrete and then build, deploy and own the solution end-to-end.

What you'll be doing

• Work directly with business, technical and product stakeholders to understand complex problems and determine what should be built.
• Rapidly turn ideas into working prototypes and production applications.
• Build full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents and multi-step workflows.
• Develop primarily with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Build agentic applications using technologies such as LangGraph, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK and OpenAI Assistants.
• Integrate Claude, GPT, Gemini and open-weight models with external tools, data and systems.
• Work with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and custom connectors.
• Build RAG and retrieval pipelines using vector databases such as Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate and pgvector.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure AI accuracy, reliability, latency and cost.
• Use modern AI development tools including Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Codex.
• Deploy and own applications in production across AWS, Azure, Cloudflare or Vercel.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, testing, security and observability.
• Demo working software directly to stakeholders and iterate quickly based on feedback.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years' relevant experience building production applications using AI / agentic development approaches.
• Strong commercial experience with Python and/or TypeScript.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents, rather than only working with prompted LLMs.
• Experience connecting models to tools and creating multi-step agentic workflows.
• Strong understanding of modern LLMs and Generative AI.
• Experience with RAG, vector databases and retrieval pipelines.
• Practical experience building and using AI evaluation harnesses.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including OOP, SOLID, clean architecture and microservices.
• Experience deploying applications into cloud environments.
• Understanding of TDD, CI/CD, security, scalability and observability.
• Confidence working directly with stakeholders and turning ambiguous requirements into working software.
• Evidence of things you've recently built - whether commercially, through GitHub, open-source projects, side projects or your own products.
• A degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related technical discipline.

Nice to have

• Healthcare or life-sciences experience.
• MLOps and model-serving experience.
• Data pipeline experience with technologies such as Spark, Airflow, Beam or Glue.
• Public writing, talks or contributions around AI engineering.
• Relevant AWS or cloud certifications.

Why consider it?

• Build at the forefront of AI and agentic software engineering.
• Take genuine ownership from problem discovery through to production.
• Work directly with clients rather than being several layers removed from the problem.
• Build technology tackling meaningful challenges across healthcare and life sciences.
• Join an organisation investing in its growing UK engineering capability.
• Work alongside experienced international engineering, product and technology teams.
• Competitive compensation and opportunities for continued development.