GoldFern
Forward Deployed Engineer - UK Government
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About the Role
I am actively recruiting a senior Forward Deployed Engineer for a Government AI unit that's building and scaling AI products used by a large number of end-users across the sector. This is genuinely impactful front-line work - you'll be shipping things that go straight into the hands of the people using them, not building for a spec handed down from someone else.
The role is fully hands-on and end-to-end (owning the whole stack yourself). This includes frontend, backend, database, AI - and you carry that ownership through to a live, working result that makes a measurable difference, with security and production reliability built in from the start. It's a fast-moving, sometimes ambiguous environment, and the kind of full ownership you don't often get in bigger, more process-heavy organisations. This is one of 2-3 senior hires being made for the team, so there's real scope to help shape how it works.
Key Responsibilities
- Building and deploying AI-native software into live production, end to end
- Personally owning every part of the stack: frontend, backend, database, AI, observability and monitoring, containerisation - not directing others or owning one slice of it
- Building things like LLM and agentic workflows, speech-to-text, translation, document intelligence and data pipelines
- Working directly with a large number of end-users across the sector to understand real problems and ship solutions that actually get adopted
- Moving between several concurrent projects and a good amount of ambiguity without dropping quality, security or judgement
- Staying genuinely current on how modern AI systems behave and fail
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Person Requirements
- Proven experience building and deploying AI-native software in production, with full personal ownership of the whole stack - not a partial slice of it, and not directed work
- A track record of shipping something real: a live, in-production result with a measurable, tangible outcome, not just a described capability
- Experience building LLM and agentic workflows, speech-to-text, translation, document intelligence or similar
- Security and production reliability treated as part of the build from day one, not bolted on at the end
- An applied, current understanding of how AI systems actually behave - things like context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool-using agents and their failure modes
- Comfortable working directly with real users and thriving in complex, ambiguous organisations
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Desirable Experience
- Next.js, FastAPI and Postgres, or clearly transferable equivalents
- Experience designing safeguards for AI systems: prompt-injection defences, least-privilege tool access, human approval points, auditable decision trails
- Delivery experience in a regulated, safety-critical or otherwise high-consequence environment
- Taking a product from early prototype through to production and adoption at scale
- Good judgement on build-versus-buy, and experience integrating third-party models or platforms rather than building everything from scratch
Additional Information
This role will be inside IR35 and is being run exclusively through Goldfern. If this sounds like you, or someone in your network, get in touch with me for a confidential conversation - happy to share fuller detail once we've spoken and the above criteria has been met. If the above can be fully evidenced and demonstrated, a conversation with the stakeholder can happen this week and a prompt start will be required. Whilst you do not need to hold SC clearance, you will gain this on assignment and be able to start with basic DBS checks and references/right to work etc.
Contact: lester@goldfern.co.uk
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