SR2 | Socially Responsible Recruitment | Certified B Corporation™
Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineer
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Forward Deployed Engineer - AI / Agentic Engineering
Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2x on-site)
Type: Permanent, Full-time
Salary: £80,000 - £90,000
SR2 is partnering with an exciting digital health technology company that works with pharmaceutical, biotech, and healthcare organisations to build AI and data-driven solutions addressing real-world challenges.
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer who combines strong software engineering with hands-on experience building modern AI and agentic applications.
This is a builder-first role working closely with clients and product teams, taking ambiguous problems, turning them into something concrete, and then building, deploying, and owning the solution end-to-end.
What you'll be doing
- Work directly with business, technical, and product stakeholders to understand complex problems and determine what should be built.
- Rapidly turn ideas into working prototypes and production applications.
- Build full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents, and multi-step workflows.
- Develop primarily with Python and/or TypeScript.
- Build agentic applications using technologies such as LangGraph, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK, and OpenAI Assistants.
- Integrate Claude, GPT, Gemini, and open-weight models with external tools, data, and systems.
- Work with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and custom connectors.
- Build RAG and retrieval pipelines using vector databases such as Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate, and pgvector.
- Develop evaluation frameworks to measure AI accuracy, reliability, latency, and cost.
- Use modern AI development tools including Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Codex.
- Deploy and own applications in production across AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, or Vercel.
- Work with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, testing, security, and observability.
- Demo working software directly to stakeholders and iterate quickly based on feedback.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years' relevant experience building production applications using AI/agentic development approaches.
- Strong commercial experience with Python and/or TypeScript.
- Hands-on experience building AI agents, rather than only working with prompted LLMs.
- Experience connecting models to tools and creating multi-step agentic workflows.
- Strong understanding of modern LLMs and Generative AI.
- Experience with RAG, vector databases, and retrieval pipelines.
- Practical experience building and using AI evaluation harnesses.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals including OOP, SOLID, clean architecture, and microservices.
- Experience deploying applications into cloud environments.
- Understanding of TDD, CI/CD, security, scalability, and observability.
- Confidence working directly with stakeholders and turning ambiguous requirements into working software.
- Evidence of things you've recently built - whether commercially, through GitHub, open-source projects, side projects, or your own products.
- A degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Nice to have
- Healthcare or life-sciences experience.
- MLOps and model-serving experience.
- Data pipeline experience with technologies such as Spark, Airflow, Beam, or Glue.
- Public writing, talks, or contributions around AI engineering.
- Relevant AWS or cloud certifications.
Why consider it?
- Build at the forefront of AI and agentic software engineering.
- Take genuine ownership from problem discovery through to production.
- Work directly with clients rather than being several layers removed from the problem.
- Build technology tackling meaningful challenges across healthcare and life sciences.
- Join an organisation investing in its growing UK engineering capability.
- Work alongside experienced international engineering, product, and technology teams.
- Competitive compensation and opportunities for continued development.
Apply directly here or drop me your CV to adam.lockett@sr2rec.co.uk
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills