Forward Deployed Engineer

Ronald James
Ne11Ad, United Kingdom
Today
£75,000 – £85,000 pa

Salary

£75,000 – £85,000 pa

Posted
16 Oct 2026 (Today)

The Role

We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own end-to-end software delivery for customers, primarily based in the US. Working closely with our customer-facing team, you’ll turn business requirements into practical, production-ready applications.

This is a broad, hands-on role combining software engineering, solution architecture, technical delivery and occasional customer engagement. You’ll have significant autonomy, using AI-assisted development tools to build products efficiently while ensuring high standards of code quality, security and reliability.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own projects from requirements gathering and technical design through to development, testing and deployment.
  • Translate ambiguous business problems into effective software solutions.
  • Use AI-native development tools to build, review and deploy applications.
  • Make architectural and technical decisions, balancing speed, quality and maintainability.
  • Collaborate with customers and internal teams to ensure successful delivery.
  • Take ownership of project progress and provide feedback to improve the platform.

Essential Skills

  • Strong professional software engineering experience, ideally at senior level.
  • Proven experience building and shipping complete software products.
  • Solid understanding of software architecture, web applications, APIs and databases.
  • Confidence using AI coding tools and validating AI-generated code.
  • Strong technical judgement, communication and problem-solving skills.
  • Ability to work autonomously, manage delivery and translate business needs into technical solutions.

Desirable Experience

  • Startup or small-team environments.
  • Building products from scratch or founding a software business.
  • Technical leadership, project delivery or solution architecture.
  • Direct customer engagement and experience working with non-technical stakeholders.
  • Familiarity with AI-native development and agentic coding tools.

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If you have been watching AI job boards over the past year, one title keeps surfacing again and again: the forward deployed engineer, or FDE. It has gone from a niche term known mainly to Palantir alumni to arguably the hottest role in the entire AI hiring market. Job postings for forward deployed engineers have exploded, salaries have climbed past levels most software engineers will ever see, and the biggest names in AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, Databricks and Palantir — are all competing for the same small pool of talent. So what exactly is an AI forward deployed engineer, why has demand surged so dramatically, and how do you position yourself to land one of these roles? This guide breaks it all down for AI engineers, software engineers and data scientists looking at their next move.