AI Forward Deployed Engineer

The team you';ll be working with: The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a senior, customer-facing practitioner who connects customer needs, measurable business outcomes, and technology solutions. Working directly within customer environments, the FDE partners with business and technical stakeholders to understand complex challenges, reduce ambiguity, make opportunities tangible, and establish a credible path from idea to production value. The FDE combines depth in a relevant specialist discipline with broad knowledge of company and partner platforms, products, accelerators, and reusable assets. They apply domain context, technical judgement, and commercial awareness to identify high-impact opportunities and determine the most appropriate route to the customer outcome, including bespoke AI delivery, product capabilities, platform or infrastructure services, and reuse of existing assets. The FDE acts as the persistent outcome thread between customer stakeholders and internal engineering, product, architecture, delivery, and operations teams. They shape validated opportunities into delivery-ready work, remain connected through implementation and adoption, and use customer feedback and production evidence to guide improvement without replacing the accountable production delivery or managed service teams. Combining domain understanding, technical credibility, strong client emotional intelligence, and outcome leadership, the FDE operates independently in ambiguous enterprise environments and is trusted to lead complex customer engagements. The role requires hands-on problem solving, sound judgement, effective stakeholder influence, and the ability to orchestrate the right capabilities while maintaining focus on measurable customer value and scalable delivery. What you';ll be doing: Partner with customers and stakeholders to understand business objectives, workflow challenges, desired outcomes, and the measures that will demonstrate success. Lead discovery, assessment, and solution-shaping activities that translate ambiguous business needs into clear, prioritised opportunities. Establish outcome hypotheses, success measures, key assumptions, and customer ownership before recommending material investment or progression. Create or direct rapid prototypes, proof points, experiments, and demonstrations that test the assumptions most critical to value and feasibility. Assess solution feasibility across AI, data, integration, architecture, security, privacy, Responsible AI, operational readiness, and cost considerations. Shape validated opportunities into production-ready work, including target workflow, architecture direction, prioritised backlog, dependencies, acceptance direction, estimates, and mobilisation requirements. Build trusted relationships with technical, business, and senior stakeholders, providing clear guidance and constructive challenge throughout customer engagements. Collaborate across engineering, architecture, product, delivery, operations, industry, transformation, and account teams to orchestrate the capabilities required for successful outcomes. Analyze and resolve complex business, technical, and operational challenges using sound judgement, evidence, and structured problem-solving. Identify high-value use cases by combining domain context, stakeholder insight, technology capability, feasibility, and measurable business impact. Determine the most appropriate delivery route, including AI Studio, company products, AI Factory, transformation services, partner capabilities, reuse, further validation, or stop. Maintain the outcome thread as work moves into delivery by validating major decisions, assumptions, user feedback, adoption needs, and continued alignment to the intended value. Capture field feedback, implementation learning, defects, feature requests, customer signals, and reusable patterns from customer engagements. Contribute to internal IP, accelerators, reference architectures, implementation playbooks, reusable assets, and continuous improvement of the Forward Deployed and AI Studio methods. Provide guidance, mentoring, and knowledge sharing to FDE Candidates and delivery practitioners to strengthen capability and successful outcomes. Role may require working at customer sites, company offices, or hybrid delivery locations depending on engagement needs. What experience you';ll bring: Typically 8+ years of relevant experience in software or AI engineering, solution architecture, consulting, customer engineering, product engineering, industry transformation, technology delivery, or related disciplines, with equivalent demonstrated depth considered. Significant experience working directly with enterprise customers and building credibility with business, technical, and senior stakeholders. Experience independently leading discovery, problem framing, solution shaping, or complex customer workstreams in ambiguous environments. Experience creating or directing prototypes, proof poi