Forward-Deployed Senior Software Engineer (AI products)
Epsom & Barbican, London | Hybrid (One office day per week) | Permanent | Full-Time
Competitive salary, depending on experience
37.5 hour per week
We are seeking Forward-deployed Senior Software/AI Product Engineers to identify, design, build and put into production AI-powered tools that solve real business problems. This is a genuinely forward-deployed role : you will be embedded with business stakeholders, with no dedicated Product Owner, Business Analyst or Delivery Manager between you and the business, so you will own discovery, scoping, prioritisation, delivery and stakeholder communication yourself. We are looking for engineers who already have significant experience of working this way , with success measured through adoption, reliability and measurable business value.
Successful candidates will be comfortable owning the full lifecycle, combining strong, product-driven software engineering fundamentals and practical application of AI technologies with cloud and DevOps expertise to deliver value quickly and safely. While AI-assisted development is central to the role, this remains a hands-on software engineering position requiring strong coding, critical-thinking, architectural and operational capabilities.
As a Forward-deployed Senior Software Engineer, you will:
Own discovery, problem definition, scoping and prioritisation directly with the business, acting as your own product owner and business analyst.
Build digital products, AI-powered features, agents and automated workflows that solve priority business challenges.
Work embedded with business stakeholders as their direct engineering partner, validating ideas and quantifying benefits quickly through AI-prototyped products and solutions rather than documentation.
Use AI-assisted tools (Claude and/or Copilot) to take solutions from discovery and prototype through testing, deployment, monitoring, and iterative development.
Manage your own delivery, including planning, managing expectations, communicating progress and trade-offs, and reporting outcomes to stakeholders at all levels.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation of cloud-hosted solutions.
Productionise successful prototypes into secure, maintainable internal applications.
Champion effective use of AI to increase engineering productivity and accelerate delivery.
As a Forward-deployed Senior Software Engineer, you’ll bring experience in:
Working in a forward-deployed or embedded engineering model , for example through a digital agency or consultancy, a start-up or scale-up, or a small product team, where you worked directly with the customer or business to uncover needs and deliver solutions.
Translating loosely defined business challenges and/or requirements into working digital products, collaborating directly with stakeholders to validate ideas through rapid iteration.
Strong stakeholder collaboration and management skills, including the confidence to challenge, negotiate priorities and manage expectations with senior business stakeholders, plus product judgement and a bias for practical delivery.
AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude) to accelerate digital product delivery, rapidly producing prototypes, proof-of-concepts and production-ready solutions whilst maintaining appropriate levels of quality, security and maintainability.
Building AI functionality into a product or application, for example by integrating LLM-based features using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI or similar platforms, with exposure to techniques and frameworks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Model Context Protocol (MCP) vector databases and embeddings, semantic search and agentic workflows.
Full-stack engineering, building web applications, dashboards, APIs and internal tools using established languages (JavaScript/Java/Python) and frameworks (e.g. React), integrating data from internal and third-party platforms, with a strong grounding in…