Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer is a senior technical leader who sets architecture and engineering direction across multiple teams and engagements. You will tackle most complex technical challenges, defines platform and solution architectures for enterprise AI systems in regulated environments, and elevates engineering capability across the firm. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with broad organisational influence. Sounds great, what will you do: • Define technical architecture and engineering strategy across multiple client engagements, platforms, and teams. • Lead the architecture and design of complex, secure, large-scale production systems for regulated enterprise clients. • Establish engineering standards, reference architectures, and best practices that drive consistency across the organisation. • Provide hands-on technical leadership in solving complex delivery, scalability, performance, and reliability challenges. • Partner closely with delivery leaders, architects, and senior client stakeholders to shape technical direction, solutions, and proposals. • Mentor senior and staff-level engineers while strengthening technical capabilities and building a high-performing engineering bench across teams. • Contribute reusable platforms, accelerators, and frameworks that improve delivery efficiency and scale across teams. • Promote the responsible and effective adoption of AI tools throughout the engineering organisation. Sounds perfect to me, what specifics are you looking for? • 10–15 years of experience architecting and delivering production-grade software systems at scale. • Deep expertise in system design, distributed systems, and cloud-native architecture. • Proven track record of setting technical direction across multiple engineering teams or an entire business line. • Experience delivering technology solutions within regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, and insurance is highly valued. • Strong ability to influence technical decisions, communicate with senior stakeholders, and lead through ambiguity. • Strong hands-on engineering expertise with the credibility to engage deeply in complex technical challenges. • Proven experience owning architecture for mission-critical systems within large, regulated enterprises. • Experience architecting and scaling AI, LLM, or agentic AI platforms in production environments. • Demonstrated ability to shape engineering culture, establish technical standards, and develop reusable platforms and frameworks across an organisation. • Recognised as a technical authority with a strong track record of mentoring and developing senior and staff-level engineers. What Success Looks Like • Architectures you define enable scalable, secure, compliant delivery across engagements. • Engineering standards and platforms you set are adopted firm-wide. • Complex technical risks are anticipated and resolved before they impact delivery. • The technical capability of the firm measurably increases through your leadership.