The product is real and already living in customer environments. It's being used by serious engineering teams in scaling companies as well as enterprise businesses. The application potential is very wide, and demand is strong.
This will be deeply technical work in front of serious customers. Our client is a very well backed company growing fast, with a small, high-end deployment team that you'd be joining early.
This is a role with wide scope - you'll move between customer calls, integration work, and building real features into the core product, sometimes in the same week.
Our client's product takes one of the most painful, manual parts of software engineering and automates it. Their customers are demanding, technical engineering teams, and the product is genuinely hardcore. That's why their Forward Deployed Engineers have to be strong engineers first, and love being in front of customers second.
They're growing their deployment team and need someone who can own how customers go from first pilot to a live, working integration.
What You'll Be Doing
You'll own deployments end to end, across both the pre-sales and post-sales sides. Every customer's setup is different, so you'll routinely hit technical hiccups that need you to build something specific for them - a custom piece of engineering that makes the product work in their environment.
You'll go deep into the core of the product. On a lean team the scope is wide: one week you're solving a hard, customer-specific engineering problem, the next you're doing customer-success and product work, shaping small features that generate real value. You'll pick up breadth fast, and you'll rarely do the same thing twice.
Because the team is small and the work is technical, you'll be trusted to drive things end to end - to own a pilot or a deal to the finish line.
What You'll Need
Essential:
- A genuinely strong engineer - you can work a hard, logic-heavy problem in real time, and you're at home dropping into a big codebase you've never seen and tracing a fault to its source
- You want to be customer-facing - most of your week will be spent with customers, and you're the kind of person a founder is happy to send into a customer's office alone
- Several years in a role that was genuinely hard on the engineering side, ideally where you also sat close to the customer - getting a product working inside someone else's stack, not demoing it from a slide
- Real drive - a big workload and a hard problem are what get you going, and you stay with something difficult instead of bailing when it stops being fun
- A computer-science background from a strong university, or - failing that - someone who was already deep in real code as a young person and never stopped
Bonus:
- You’ve been the first engineer on something, building it from nothing, or you’re an ex-founder who lived on the technical side
- Comfortable in the full stack and how systems talk to each other over the wire
- Forward-deployed or customer-facing engineering experience at a strong, technical company is a must
The Person
You'd rather own an outcome than a ticket, and customers energise you rather than drain you. You're an engineer who still writes code - if it's been years since you last wrote the code yourself and you'd be leaning on an advisory or solutions background; this isn't the one.
You want breadth over a narrow lane, you're happy moving between the code and the customer, and you're not after a clock-off-at-five, never-leave-your-desk seat or a heads-down role with no customer contact. When a pilot gets messy, you're the one who drives it back to a good state.
The Role
Based in London, on-site five days a week. Up to four or five days a month travelling.
Competitive salary and equity. Visa sponsorship is not available.