Venatrix
Forward Deployed Engineer
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Forward Deployed Engineer | Recently-Funded Early-Stage Startup | London based
We're working with a recently-funded early-stage startup building AI tools that need to actually work inside customers' real, messy environments, not just in a demo. They're hiring their first Forward Deployed Engineer, so there's no existing process to slot into. You'd be building it as you go.
You'll be writing the code yourself, not scoping it for someone else to build. You'll also be in front of customers when it counts, working out what they actually need and staying on it until it's live and running without you.
What you'll be doing
- Take a customer from first conversation through to fully live, owning the whole thing rather than handing pieces off along the way
- Work inside a customer's existing systems, often a stack you didn't choose, and build on top of it without breaking what's already there
- Be the person their engineers trust and come to directly, not through anyone else
- Build with the current AI stack day to day, RAG, agent frameworks, MCP or similar, evals
- Bring what you're seeing on the ground back to the team, it'll actually change what gets built next at this stage
- Talk comfortably with engineers and with founders or execs, sometimes in the same day
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What we're looking for
- Real engineering experience, you've built and shipped production systems yourself, not just configured or customised someone else's platform
- Solid depth in Python and/or TypeScript, from things you've actually built
- Hands-on experience with RAG, an agent framework like LangChain or LangGraph, and ideally MCP, from building with these, not just plugging in a vendor's version
- You use AI coding tools day to day already, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar
- At least one customer engagement or deployment you owned yourself, whatever it was called at the time. Technical founder, professional services, embedded delivery, solutions engineering, all fine, as long as you can talk through something specific you owned
- More comfortable without a fixed brief than with one
- Open to travelling to customer sites regularly, this isn't fully remote, but it's not five days a week on-site either
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Why this one's worth a look
- £100k to £140k base plus equity, depending on experience
- Early employee equity package
- Their first FDE, so you're shaping how the role works for the next hires
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