Shape the product

• Act as the technical link between customers and the core product organization.
• Identify recurring customer requirements that should become platform capabilities.
• Feed insights from deployments into the company’s engineering and product roadmap.
• Work closely with product and engineering teams to improve the scalability and usability of the platform.
• Help determine when requirements should be solved through configuration, integration, or core product development.
• Contribute to technical and commercial decisions around new customers and use cases.

Build the Forward Deployed Engineering function

• Define the operating model for Forward Deployed Engineering.
• Recruit, develop, and lead the initial team.
• Establish delivery standards, technical documentation, and reusable deployment playbooks.
• Create an effective approach to resource planning across customer projects.
• Develop a culture of ownership, pace, technical quality, and customer empathy.
• Remain close to customer work and the code as the team grows.

Support commercial growth

• Partner with the founders and commercial team during technical discovery and solution design.
• Contribute to enterprise sales conversations, demonstrations, and proof-of-concept projects.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly to engineering teams, customer stakeholders, and senior executives.
• Build trusted relationships with technical and non-technical customer teams.
• Help evaluate whether prospective customer requirements are technically and commercially viable.

What they are looking for

• Strong hands-on software engineering experience, ideally across backend or full-stack development.
• Experience designing, building, and deploying production software.
• Practical experience with modern AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG, agents, embeddings, or model orchestration.
• Experience delivering technically complex products into enterprise customers.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, data integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
• The ability to move comfortably between customer discovery, architecture, and implementation.
• Experience working with security-conscious, regulated, or data-sensitive organizations.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly.
• Commercial awareness and an understanding of how technical decisions affect customer outcomes.
• Experience leading engineers or the clear potential to build and manage a technical team.
• Comfort operating within an early-stage environment where priorities can change quickly.
• A willingness to remain hands-on rather than operating purely as a people manager.

Particularly relevant experience

The following would be useful, although not essential:

• Previous experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or Professional Services Engineering.
• Building or leading a customer-facing engineering function.
• Experience at an enterprise AI, fintech, or financial software company.
• Delivering products into banks, insurers, investment firms, or large corporate finance teams.
• Designing secure, multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
• Working with Python, TypeScript, or comparable backend technologies.
• Deploying systems across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Integrating with enterprise data platforms and financial systems.
• Building evaluation and observability frameworks for production AI.
• Supporting technical sales, proofs of concept, or enterprise procurement processes.

This role may not suit you if

• You are looking for a purely managerial position.
• You prefer working only on a central platform without direct customer interaction.
• Your experience is focused on demonstrations or prototypes rather than production deployments.

Why join?

• Build and lead a critical engineering function from the ground up.
• Work directly with the founders and influence company strategy.
• Own some of the company’s most important enterprise deployments.
• Shape how advanced AI is applied to commercially valuable financial use cases.
• Influence both the core product and the customer delivery model.
• Join at an early stage with significant scope for ownership and progression.
• Recruit and develop a high-performing Forward Deployed Engineering team.
• Receive a competitive package, including meaningful equity.

The company is less concerned with exact job titles than with technical capability, customer judgement, and ownership.

You may already be leading a Forward Deployed Engineering or Solutions Engineering team. Alternatively, you could be a senior software engineer, AI engineer, or technical delivery leader who has repeatedly taken ownership of complex enterprise deployments.

What matters is that you can understand a customer’s problem, design the right technical approach, build the solution, and establish a team capable of repeating that success at scale.

Please apply directly here or email me your CV to adam.lockett@sr2rec.co.uk