Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Janus Henderson Group; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Janus Henderson Group is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer in London to lead the AI transformation and embed with business units. You will set technical direction, own team deliverables, and guide the roadmap across AI Platforms, Architecture, Engineering, and Governance.

The role balances hands-on coding with strategic leadership, mentoring engineers, and ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and aligned with our enterprise stack.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team and own its deliverables.
• Line-manage Forward Deployed Engineers as the team grows: hiring, onboarding, objectives, development, and performance.
• Own the team's deliverables and outputs - what is committed, what is delivered, to what standard, and by when.
• Allocate people and effort across the demand pipeline, and be the person who says no, not yet, or not like that.
• Hold the engineering bar through design and code review, and grow engineers into owning engagements themselves.
• Report progress, risk, and capacity to the Head of AI Technology and to business stakeholders honestly, including when delivery is off track.
• Design, build, and productionise bespoke, higher-complexity AI solutions yourself, taking the hardest and least-defined engagements personally.
• Own the architecture and design decisions for the team’s solutions, keeping them secure, scalable, and aligned to the enterprise core stack.
• Take solutions through

Job description

Why work for us?

A career at Janus Henderson is more than a job, it's about investing in a brighter future together.

Our Mission at Janus Henderson is to help clients define and achieve superior financial outcomes through differentiated insights, disciplined investments, and world-class service. We will do this by protecting and growing our core business, amplifying our strengths and diversifying where we have the right.

Our Values are key to driving our success, and are at the heart of everything we do:

Clients Come First - Always | Execution Supersedes Intention | Together We Win | Diversity Improves Results | Truth Builds Trust

If our mission, values, and purpose align with your own, we would love to hear from you!

Your opportunity

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role. You will build, and you will lead the people who build. It starts with your own hands on the keyboard; it grows into ownership of a team, its deliverables, and the roadmap they work to.
Janus Henderson is undertaking a firm-wide AI transformation to become the most technologically sophisticated asset manager in the industry. Our AI capability sits in a single centralised function under the Head of AI, and Forward Deployed Engineering is the part of it that embeds with the business and builds what business units cannot stand up alone. As Principal Forward Deployed Engineer you are the most senior engineer in that team and its lead. Reporting to the Head of AI Technology, you set the technical bar, own the team's deliverables and outputs, and are accountable for what it ships and runs - while still embedding with business units yourself.
You will also form part of the AI Technical Leadership Team, whose remit is to build an AI Technology roadmap that lines up with the JHI strategic roadmap and own the deliverables against it. It works across every AI technology remit - AI Platforms, AI Architecture, AI Engineering, and AI Governance Implementation - keeping them aligned so the firm has one coherent plan rather than four competing ones. It also decides what we adopt: you will review new models, tools, and vendors, test their claims against our own workloads, and judge whether they are feasible here, technically, commercially, and against the constraints a regulated asset manager operates under.
The balance of the role will shift, and we would rather be explicit than discover a mismatch later. Today it is predominantly hands-on: you are expected to be one of the strongest builders in the firm. As the team grows, the weight moves towards strategy, roadmap, and management, and your technical contribution shifts from writing most of the code to setting direction and holding the standard. If you want to stay purely hands-on, the Forward Deployed Engineer role is the better fit.

What success looks like

• Your team ships. Solutions reach production, are used, and stay healthy - and you can point to the business outcome, not the delivery activity.
• You are still trusted technically. Engineers bring you the hard problems, and you are close enough to the work to help.
• The Forward Deployed Engineering roadmap is sequenced, agreed with the AI Technical Leadership Team, and lines up with the JHI strategic roadmap.
• Technology decisions are evidence-based, and your engineers grow - people join, get productive quickly, take on more, and stay.

Your responsibilities

Lead the team and own its deliverables

• Line-manage Forward Deployed Engineers as the team grows: hiring, onboarding, objectives, development, and performance.
• Own the team's deliverables and outputs - what is committed, what is delivered, to what standard, and by when.
• Allocate people and effort across the demand pipeline, and be the person who says no, not yet, or not like that.
• Hold the engineering bar through design and code review, and grow engineers into owning engagements themselves.
• Report progress, risk, and capacity to the Head of AI Technology and to business stakeholders honestly, including when delivery is off track.

Build and deliver, hands on

• Design, build, and productionise bespoke, higher-complexity AI solutions yourself, taking the hardest and least-defined engagements personally.
• Own the architecture and design decisions for the team’s solutions, keeping them secure, scalable, and aligned to the enterprise core stack.
• Take solutions through