Forward Deployed Engineer, Procurement & AI (Stealth Venture) London / Remote (Europe)
This role sits within an early stage, well backed technology company building software for procurement and sourcing teams working with direct materials, spanning categories such as chemicals, packaging and metals. The platform is already live with enterprise customers and is built around a data-driven, analytical approach to cost and sourcing decisions.
This is not a traditional consulting role and not a pure engineering role. You will sit with procurement teams at large manufacturers, understand exactly how they make buying decisions, and build that understanding directly into the platform yourself.
What this role involves
You will work directly with category managers and procurement teams to understand how buying decisions are really made: approved suppliers, substitutions, decision rights, switching costs, and the constraints that can't be broken. You will take that understanding and encode it into the platform personally, rather than handing it off to be built by someone else. You will own the customer relationship end to end, working alongside a technical counterpart who handles the systems and integration side. You will also turn what you learn into demonstrations and pitches that speak directly to a customer's own situation, rather than a generic presentation.
What this role is looking for
Three things matter here. You don't need to be equally strong across all three, but you need genuine, demonstrable evidence on each, not just adjacent exposure.
Procurement affinity. You have lived inside procurement, whether through a category, a sourcing programme, a transformation, or cost modelling work, and you speak the language because you've done it. Experience with direct materials, chemicals, packaging, or CPG is a genuine advantage, but it is not a requirement. Depth in procurement generally matters more than the specific sector.
Customer instinct. You are genuinely strong with clients, not just comfortable around them. You earn trust quickly, and you read what a client actually needs rather than what a brief says they need. This is the hardest thing to teach and the thing this role cares about most.
Technical and AI affinity. You have built something real with data or AI, not simply explored it. You can take unstructured or messy information and turn it into a working model, and ideally you've done something like this before. Coding ability is an advantage if you have it, but it is not a requirement.
If your experience with should-cost modelling stops at building the model itself, this is unlikely to be the right fit. The bar here is being able to take that output and use it, to influence a real commercial decision, not simply to demonstrate the modelling itself.