Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineers

Indicium AI; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Anthropic training

Flexible L&D budget

Claude licenses

Job summary

Indicium AI is seeking an experienced Lead FDE to steer engagements from design to production in enterprise AI. You will design systems, make architecture calls, and lead a team to deliver complex solutions with real users. You will own client relationships and ensure delivery momentum amid organizational constraints.

You will write production code, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Anthropic field teams to push capabilities forward in Finance, Energy, and Healthcare sectors.

Qualifications

• Led AI engineering engagements end-to-end in enterprise environments.
• Owned technical direction, architecture calls and delivery quality.
• Hands-on coding experience alongside leading teams.
• Built and maintained client relationships at senior levels.
• Managed dependencies, risks, and stakeholder communications.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI engagements end-to-end from design to production deployment.
• Design production agentic AI systems and orchestration patterns.
• Develop RAG pipelines, embeddings, and hybrid search strategies.
• Build MCP servers and integrate enterprise tool ecosystems.
• Create evaluation and observability frameworks for non-deterministic systems.
• Own senior-level client technical relationships and trust.
• Navigate procurement, compliance, and IT constraints without loss of momentum.
• Mentor engineers and elevate practice through knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with Anthropic field teams on joint client engagements.

Skills

AI engineering leadership

Architecture decisions

Mentor engineers

Hands-on coding

Client relationship

Cross-functional collab

Tools

MCP servers

Enterprise tool integrations

Job description

Indicium AI was Anthropic's first European launch partner, and sits among a handful of organisations globally trusted by Anthropic to deploy Claude at enterprise scale. We are also global AWS, Microsoft and Databricks partners and Databricks Ventures has invested in our business and holds a seat on our board. Our engineers get access to the latest AI tools and models, partner technical teams, and early capability previews that the wider market does not.

We are deploying production AI systems into the world's most complex organisations across Financial Services, Energy, and Healthcare. We exist to make AI a genuine competitive advantage for our clients, not in a presentation but in production.

We invest seriously in our people. Every FDE at Indicium AI has access to Anthropic training, and a flexible learning budget to go with it. All of our staff are equipped with Claude licenses for Chat, Cowork and Claude Code. We are building a team of engineers who work at the frontier, and we back that with the investment to match.

The Role

This is a role for an engineer who wants to lead an engagement end to end, from helping design the solution through to deploying in production with real users depending on it, and you will be accountable for your team getting it there.

As a Lead FDE, you are the person the team routes its hardest problems to. You design the systems and make architecture calls. You set the delivery quality bar through reviews and standards, and you make sure it stays high when a deadline starts pressing on it.

You will deliver through other people: planning and prioritising, managing dependencies and risk, shaping who is on the team, and having the honest conversations that keep a delivery on track. Knowing which of these to do yourself and which to hand over is an important part of the job. You understand enterprise environments and how to get a system through to production inside one, working with internal review and security teams from day one rather than leaving it too late.

You will own the client relationship day to day and be the person they call when they need advice. That includes bringing bad news early with a plan attached, in a way that builds trust instead of triggering an escalation.

This is an engineering role, which is worth being explicit about. A Lead FDE is not a delivery management role with a technical flavour. You will be in the codebase every week. You will make architecture decisions and be accountable for them. You will be the person the team escalates the genuinely hard technical problem to, and you will need to be able to solve it.

What you will do

• Lead AI engineering engagements end to end, from solution design through to production deployment, in complex enterprise environments
• Design and build production agentic AI systems: multi-agent orchestration, autonomous agent workflows, tool-use patterns, and the reliability layer that makes agents trustworthy in regulated environments
• Build advanced RAG pipelines — retrieval architectures, embedding strategies, reranking, hybrid search, and the evaluation frameworks that prove they work at scale
• Develop and deploy MCP servers and tool ecosystem integrations that give agents real-world capability within enterprise infrastructure
• Design evaluation and observability frameworks for non-deterministic systems, ensuring production AI applications are measurable, debuggable, and continuously improving
• Own the client technical relationship at senior stakeholder level
• Navigate organisational complexity, such as procurement, compliance, resistant IT teams, shifting priorities, all without losing delivery momentum
• Have commercial awareness by identifying and shaping new opportunities within an existing client
• Codify repeatable deployment patterns and contribute insights that strengthen the wider business, such as reference architectures, agent patterns, and evaluation methodologies
• Mentor AI Engineers on your engagements and raise the bar for the practice through knowledge sharing
• Work alongside Anthropic field teams on joint client engagements and represent Indicium AI at the highest level

Read this as "some of these", not "all of these." Very few people arrive with the complete set. Most Leads are strong on the technical side and growing into the client and commercial side, or the other way round. If a good number of these sound like you, we encourage you to apply.

• You have taken AI systems from ambiguous problem to production deployment, including agentic systems, retrieval architectures and evaluation frameworks, inside a real organisation with real constraints
• You have owned the technical direction of a project or workstream, made the architecture calls, and been accountable for whether they held up
• You are genuinely hands-on. You write production code, you do not only review it, and you would be comfortable pairing with one of our engineers tomorrow
• You have led a delivery team: planning, sequencing, unblocking, and being straight with people about where things actually stand
• You have been the technical face of a piece of work for a client, including when it was going badly
• You have grown other engineers deliberately, through mentoring, coaching or review
• You have contributed to shaping or estimating work commercially
• You have navigated a large organisation's realities: security reviews, compliance, legacy systems, and multiple teams with different incentives

Also Interesting But Not Required

• Depth in Financial Services, Energy or Healthcare, enough to be a credible peer rather than a technology generalist
• MCP server development and enterprise tool ecosystem integration
• Prompt and context engineering, guardrails, and LLM safety patterns in production
• You have been a technical founder, and built something from nothing under commercial pressure
• Writing, speaking, or community presence in AI engineering
• Experience working alongside partner ecosystems such as Anthropic, Databricks, or AWS

What we are not asking for: a specific number of years, a consulting background, or hands-on time with every tool on this list. We care about what you have owned, and what happened as a result.

Why Indicium AI

Access to leading AI Labs: Anthropic’s first European launch partner. One of the first four OpenAI UK partners. Databricks Ventures invested and on our board. Our engineers work with capabilities before the wider market does and work jointly with teams from leading AI Labs on customer delivery.

We are builders: We embed, we architect, we build - and we stay until it works. Our engineers make real decisions on live systems, for clients in industries where getting it wrong has consequences. There are no layers between you and the work.

Problems worth solving: No two engagements are the same. The variety and complexity of enterprise AI problems at Indicium AI is something a product company simply cannot offer. If you want engagements that test every dimension of what you can do, this is where they are.

Investment in staying at the frontier: The best engineers we know are relentlessly curious - and we build an environment that supports learning and growth. Every engineer has access to leading AI training and tools, career development pathways, and a flexible L&D budget. We think that’s how it should be.