The posting
Role Overview
We are seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to design and deliver AI-driven solutions that solve complex operational and business problems.
This role sits at the intersection of business process analysis, software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI. The successful candidate will work directly with stakeholders to understand operational workflows, identify automation opportunities, translate requirements into technical designs, and build working solutions through to production deployment.
Unlike a traditional development role, the FDE will take ownership from problem discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, documentation, and handover.
Key Responsibilities
Business Process Discovery & Solution Design
- Conduct structured discovery and requirements-gathering sessions with business and operational teams.
- Identify operational pain points, manual processes, inefficiencies, and opportunities for AI-enabled automation.
- Analyse existing workflows and document current-state and future-state processes.
- Develop process maps, workflow diagrams, data flows, and solution blueprints using BPMN, value stream mapping, swim-lane diagrams, or similar methodologies.
- Translate unstructured business requirements into clear functional and technical solution requirements.
- Ensure solution designs are sufficiently detailed for both business validation and technical implementation.
AI Agent & Workflow Design
- Design end-to-end AI and agentic workflows covering triggers, decision logic, tool usage, integrations, human-in-the-loop controls, exception handling, and failure scenarios.
- Develop AI-enabled automation solutions using approved Large Language Models (LLMs) and enterprise AI services.
- Determine where AI and automation can add value and where human judgement and approval should remain part of the process.
- Apply appropriate controls and constraints to AI-driven workflows.
- Design solutions that comply with security, data protection, and restricted-environment requirements.
Technical Implementation
- Translate solution designs into working, production-ready implementations.
- Develop applications and automation components using Python or other appropriate backend programming languages.
- Build and deploy solutions using cloud-native infrastructure.
- Develop and maintain containerised applications and workloads.
- Integrate applications and platforms using REST APIs, event-driven integrations, workflow automation, and other integration patterns.
- Design appropriate data flows, error handling, logging, and operational resilience into solutions.
- Provision, configure, and troubleshoot cloud resources including compute, networking, identity, and access management.
- Apply DevSecOps practices including version control, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment, and Infrastructure as Code.
- Write maintainable, documented, and extensible production-quality code.
- Support deployment within restricted, controlled, or air-gapped technology environments where applicable.
- Ensure solutions comply with security requirements governing data movement, system access, and AI service usage.
Stakeholder Engagement & Delivery
- Present proposed solutions and technical designs to business stakeholders and technical teams.
- Explain technical concepts, solution options, risks, and trade-offs clearly to different audiences.
- Manage assigned workstreams from discovery and design through development, testing, deployment, and handover.
- Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, cybersecurity, architecture, and business teams.
- Produce technical documentation, operating guides, solution specifications, and knowledge-transfer materials.
- Ensure delivered solutions can be effectively operated, maintained, and extended by other teams.
Required Skills
- Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Strong software development skills with proficiency in at least one backend programming language, preferably Python.
- Ability to develop production-quality applications and automation solutions rather than only prototypes or proof-of-concepts.
- Good understanding of cloud infrastructure including compute, networking, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and application deployment.
- Experience working with containerisation and orchestration technologies.
- Understanding of how containerised workloads are deployed, scaled, secured, and operated within enterprise environments.
- Hands-on understanding of DevSecOps practices including Git/version control, CI/CD pipelines, automated deployment, and Infrastructure as Code.
- Understanding of LLM application development and AI-enabled workflow design.
- Ability to design appropriate controls around AI decision-making and human-in-the-loop processes.
- Experience integrating applications and platforms using APIs and modern integration patterns.
- Ability to independently conduct business process discovery and requirements elicitation sessions.
- Experience documenting as-is and to-be business processes.
- Proficiency with process modelling techniques such as BPMN, swim-lane diagrams, data flow diagrams, or equivalent.
- Ability to translate business requirements into functional and technical solution designs.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and solution-design capabilities.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to operate independently within ambiguous and rapidly evolving project environments.
- Strong security awareness when working with sensitive or restricted information.
- Must be able to obtain and maintain the required MSD CAT 1 security clearance.
Preferred Skills
- Experience delivering AI, Generative AI, LLM, or intelligent automation solutions within enterprise environments.
- Experience designing or implementing AI agents and multi-step agentic workflows.
- Knowledge of AI safety, governance, and responsible AI practices.
- Experience working within government, defence, public sector, or other highly regulated technology environments.
- Previous exposure to restricted, classified, or air-gapped environments.
- Experience with IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms and understanding of ITIL processes.
- Familiarity with platform engineering concepts including developer portals, self-service provisioning, and reusable deployment templates.
- Understanding of enterprise architecture and technical design principles.
- Experience with Kubernetes or similar container orchestration platforms.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
Key Competencies
- Strong ownership and ability to independently drive solutions from discovery through deployment.
- Ability to operate effectively where requirements need to be discovered and refined rather than simply provided.
- Strong business and technical problem-solving capabilities.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong stakeholder engagement and workshop facilitation skills.
- Security-conscious approach to solution architecture and implementation.
- Pragmatic approach to determining when AI, traditional automation, or human decision-making is appropriate.
