Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

Takeaway; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Just Eat Takeaway.com is seeking a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer in London, with 3 days a week in the office. You will join a technically sharp, product-minded team to push AI across the org, turning learnings into durable improvements and shaping how we build.

The role requires building production AI systems, prototyping prompts and agents, and communicating findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Strong software and AI fundamentals are essential.

Qualifications

• Experience building AI applications in production.
• Ability to translate SMEs challenges into technical signals.
• Strong debugging and evaluation design skills.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with internal teams and strategic partners to understand critical workflows, uncover failure modes, and identify high-impact opportunities for AI improvement.
• Prototype and iterate on prompts, agents, and workflow designs to understand system behaviour and unlock real value.
• Synthesise findings for Product Engineering and Platform teams, turning usage patterns into clear evaluations and artefacts.
• Build repeatable tools and evaluation approaches that raise the quality bar across multiple use cases.
• Operate with strong judgment in ambiguous environments and communicate findings clearly.
• Build relationships across engineering and product communities as a trusted technical partner.

Skills

AI fundamentals

Software engineering

Prototyping

Communication

Tools

AWS

ECS

Lambda

DynamoDB

SQS

Job description

Position: Staff Forward Deployed Engineer Location: London, 3 days a week in office

The Role: We're looking for a technically sharp, product-minded engineer to help push the frontier of AI across Just Eat Takeaway. You'll work with some of our most ambitious internal teams and technology partners - helping them get the most out of advanced AI, and turning those learnings into durable improvements across our organisation. This is a builder role. You'll dig into complex workflows, identify the gaps that matter, and translate them into concrete technical insights that shape how we build. If you're as comfortable debugging a live workflow as you are designing an evaluation framework or presenting findings to a non-technical audience, you'll fit right in.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work directly with internal teams and strategic partners to understand critical workflows, uncover failure modes, and identify the highest-impact opportunities for AI improvement.
• Prototype and iterate on prompts, agents, and workflow designs to understand system behaviour and unlock real value - not just theoretical improvements.
• Synthesise findings for our Product Engineering and Platform teams, turning real usage patterns into clear, reproducible evaluations, benchmarks, and technical artefacts that improve product and platform quality.
• Build repeatable tools, patterns, and evaluation approaches that raise the quality bar across multiple use cases - not just one-off fixes.
• Operate with strong judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing immediate technical problem-solving with longer-term systemic improvement.
• Build relationships across our engineering and product communities, serving as a trusted technical partner to individuals and teams alike.

These are some of the key components to the position: You'll thrive here if you have strong software engineering and AI fundamentals - whether that's from experience in a startup, or a product focused role in a larger org. Software engineer, ML engineer, data scientist, or equivalent. Product Managers, BAs or Technical Programme Managers keen to return to a builder role. A track record of shipping production systems end-to-end is a strong plus.

What will you bring to the team?

• Experience building AI applications, agents, or evaluation systems, with the ability to reason clearly about model behaviour in complex workflows.
• Comfort working directly with highly experienced functional SMEs and translating their challenges into concrete technical signals.
• Production experience with AWS at scale, using services like ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS
• Fluency moving between prototyping, debugging, evaluation design, and cross-functional collaboration - sometimes all in the same day.
• Working across every layer of the stack - Able to switch between configuring a connector in an admin panel to prompting an agent to contribute code back to our underlying platform.
• Clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences - you can explain what you found and why it matters.
• High agency and a strong product sense, with a bias toward building things that last rather than one-off fixes.
• AI First problem solving, deeply experienced with AI tools to drive fast solution creation, able to balance model usage to maximise ROI, everything from coding to design and more.
• Bonus: Familiarity with complex market place businesses. Experience as an early-stage startup engineer or in a previous FDE style role. None of these is a dealbreaker - we're more interested in how you think than what you've already shipped.
• AWS Solutions Architect - Associate (Nice to have)

At JET, this is how we play

Our teams forge connections internally and work with some of the best-known brands on the planet, giving us truly international impact in a dynamic environment. Being the best at what we do isn't just about delivering on our strategy. It's a competition for something incredibly valuable - our customers' choice. Every time a customer decides where to order, they're picking a side. At the heart of the JET Customer League are our values and behaviours. They guide every interaction, every decision, every innovation. These are the actions we need to perform consistently and brilliantly, to surpass the competition and earn our customers' loyalty, again and again. Fun, fast-paced and supportive, the JET culture is about movement, growth, helping one another to succeed and celebrating wins. By truly living our values and embodying our behaviours, we're building a customer-first culture which enables us to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Inclusion, Diversity & Belonging

No matter who you are, what you look like, who you love, or where you are from, you can find your place at Just Eat Takeaway.com. We're committed to creating an inclusive culture, encouraging diversity of people and thinking, in which all employees feel they truly belong and can bring their most colourful selves to work every day.