Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

Ocho; Belfast City District; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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Pension

Private medical

Generous time off

Job summary

Ocho is seeking an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer to solve real customer problems and deliver end-to-end solutions on a secure AI platform used by highly regulated organisations across the UK. You’ll work directly with a few customer teams, define requirements, build on top of the platform, and drive adoption in production.

You will ship data integrations, APIs, and backend services and deploy LLM-powered applications in secure environments.

Qualifications

• Proven experience shipping production systems.
• Hands-on with LLMs in production environments.
• Experience across data pipelines, APIs, and backend services.
• Comfort working with non-technical stakeholders.
• Daily use of AI tools and agentic coding tools.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand problems to solve.
• Build end-to-end solutions on the platform, from data integration to interfaces.
• Deploy LLMs and agentic apps in secure environments and keep them running.
• Own delivery lifecycle from scoping to adoption.
• Feed learnings back to platform and product teams.

Skills

Python

LLMs in production

Data pipelines

APIs

Backend services

Frontend basics

Customer-facing

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

If you're an engineer who would rather be solving a customer's real problem than working through a backlog of tickets, this one is worth a read.

My client builds a secure AI platform used by highly regulated organisations across the UK. Their applications are already running in live environments for some very demanding customers, and they're hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to work directly with those customers.

As a Lead FDE you'll work closely alongside a small number of customer teams and own their problems end to end. You'll work out what they actually need, build it on top of the platform, get it into production and make sure people use it.

What you'll be doing

• Working directly with customers to understand how they operate and pin down the problems worth solving
• Building and shipping solutions on the platform end to end, from data integration and backend services through to the interfaces people use
• Getting LLM and agentic applications into production in secure environments, and keeping them running
• Owning delivery for your customers, from scoping through to adoption
• Feeding what you learn back to the platform and product teams

What you'll need

• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python or comparable, with a track record of shipping systems into production
• Real, hands-on experience building with LLMs in production, not just a proof of concept
• Breadth across the stack: data pipelines, APIs, backend services, and enough frontend to put something usable in front of people
• Comfort working directly with customers, including non-technical stakeholders, and turning a loosely defined problem into something you can build
• Daily use of AI tools in how you build, including agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Cursor

Nice to have

• Previous forward deployed, solutions engineering or consulting-style delivery experience
• Experience in government, public sector, financial services or other regulated industries
• Familiarity with RAG, agentic frameworks and protocols such as MCP
• Cloud experience (AWS, GCP or Azure) and containerisation with Docker or Kubernetes

On offer is a competitive salary, share options, pension and private medical, plus one of the most generous approaches to time off I've come across in the Belfast market.