Principal Forward Deployed AI Engineers

Indicium AI; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Indicium AI in London seeks a Principal FDE to scale impact across multiple AI engagements, combining hands-on engineering with strategic technical leadership. You will set direction, review work, and ensure delivery quality while managing commercial health and client relationships.

You will grow senior engineers, shape pre-sales and discovery, and bring reference architectures back into the group to accelerate future engagements.

Qualifications

• Takes AI systems from ambiguous problem to production deployment within complex organisations.
• Led delivery teams: planning, sequencing, unblocking, reporting status clearly.
• Hands-on: you write production code and pair with engineers.
• Acts as the technical face of work, even under pressure.
• Navigates security, compliance, and legacy systems in large organisations.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of complex AI engagements, and be accountable for production viability.
• Set architectural patterns for agentic systems at scale, including memory design and recovery.
• Design and build production agentic AI systems with orchestration, workflows, and tool-use patterns.
• Develop and deploy MCP servers and tool integrations enabling real-world enterprise capability.
• Design evaluation and observability frameworks for non-deterministic systems and measurable outputs.

Skills

Agentic systems

Production code

Pre-sales support

Stakeholder management

Tools

RAG pipelines

MCP servers

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 experienced Engineer who wants to scale their impact and have technical authority in multiple areas rather than a single engagement. It is a hands-on Engineering role, with a wider technical remit and more people and commercial responsibility attached. You will be in the codebase regularly, working on the hardest parts, and you will be expected to be the strongest technical voice in most rooms you are in. Staying in the work is what keeps your judgement valuable.

You will know how to deliver through the squads you work with - setting direction, reviewing, intervening early when an engagement starts to drift, and improving how the whole programme delivers rather than personally delivering all of it. You will also manage the commercial health of the work, overseeing scope, burn and margin, and you will recognise when a technical decision has a commercial impact.

Over time you stop being the supplier's lead engineer and become a trusted partner who shapes their roadmap with them rather than only delivering it. Other accounts will call you too, when a relationship needs senior technical credibility.

You will also play an active role in growing the wider Indicium AI business. You will bring reference architectures, agent and evaluation patterns, and accelerators back into the group to make the next engagement faster. You will help hire and grow our talent, ensuring the next generation of Principals are ready to go. You will help with discovery and pre-sales of new engagements and help our Client teams land new clients.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction of complex AI engagements or multiple concurrent engagements, making the architecture calls and being accountable for how they hold up in production
• Set the architectural patterns for agentic systems at scale, including state and memory design, failure modes and recovery.
• 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
• Deliver workstreams through Lead and Senior FDEs, intervening early with reviews and course corrections rather than quietly taking the work back
• Be accountable for delivery quality across your engagements: outcomes, timeline, and commercial health including scope, burn and margin
• Manage senior stakeholders in our clients, act as trusted advisor to client technology leadership, helping to shape their roadmap beyond the current engagement
• Influence wins through pre-sales, technical points of view, proposal shaping, and partner relationships
• Develop our Senior and Lead FDEs towards the next step in their career, and shape coaching and L&D across the technology practice
• Create IP, accelerators and reference architectures that improve speed and margin on engagements you are not personally on
• Help develop the Indicium AI business through internal initiatives.
• 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." Principal FDE is a wide role, and people arrive at it from different directions: deep technical authority, strong client leadership, or a track record of building things that outlast a single engagement. 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 the decisions made
• 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, including when it was going badly
• You have grown other engineers deliberately, through mentoring, coaching or review
• You have navigated a the reality of working in a large organisation: security reviews, compliance, legacy systems, and multiple teams with different incentives

Also Interesting But Not Required

• A consultancy background is helpful; understanding the commercial model and how to navigate the landscape of a consultancy/client relationship
• Depth in Financial Services, Energy or Healthcare, enough to be a credible peer rather than a technology generalist
• You have contributed to shaping or estimating work commercially
• 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.