Forward Deployed Engineering - Director

Description

The company is building agentic AI systems, and this role leads the Forward Deployed Engineering squads that deliver them inside the company's Lines of Business.

The Applied AI and Agents Factory brings engineers together to turn advanced AI into production-ready solutions, working alongside business and technology teams from first concept through to live deployment.

The work goes beyond conversational tools: agents that reason, plan and carry out multi-step workflows, covering architecture, orchestration, enterprise integration, security and observability.

The Factory is hands-on and built for fast delivery, and its reusable tools and engineering standards are adopted across the wider organisation.

Responsibilities

• Direct staffing, technical design, sprint planning and delivery across 3 to 5 embedded FDE pods building high-impact AI agents at the same time.
• Work with core platform teams to turn custom line-of-business agent workflows into reusable enterprise components, modular toolsets and platform capabilities.
• Meet Line of Business Managing Directors and operational leaders to run immersion workshops, find the workflow bottlenecks that cause the most friction, and scope agentic opportunities worth pursuing.
• Set up a rapid prototyping framework, Concept-to-Working-Pilot in under 2 weeks, used across embedded pods, balancing quick feedback cycles with enterprise safety and production standards.
• Recruit, mentor and lead an organisation of 20+ Forward Deployed Engineers at grades C12 to C14, building a culture of engineering rigour, customer empathy, rapid prototyping and psychological safety.
• Make sure every agent built by embedded squads follows enterprise architecture blueprints, passes automated evaluation gates, meets AI safety guardrails and uses secure coding practices.
• Lead the design and build of high-throughput integrations that connect autonomous agents to core transactional banking engines, data lakes and third-party APIs.
• Assess risk in business decisions with close attention to the firm's reputation and to protecting the company, its clients and its assets. Drive compliance with laws, rules, regulations and Policy, apply sound ethical judgment, escalate and report control issues openly, supervise others, and hold people to these standards.

Requirements

• 15+ years of relevant software engineering experience, including 6 to 8+ years leading engineering squads in Tier-1 banking, top-tier technology firms, high-growth AI scale-ups or fintech.
• Strong grasp of modern AI approaches, including LLMs, multi-agent frameworks, vector search, RAG architectures and Model Context Protocol, plus deep distributed systems engineering skills.
• A proven record of managing high-stakes relationships with senior executives and of deploying mission-critical software into heavily regulated production environments.
• Strong working knowledge of financial products, capital markets, transaction banking, wealth management or enterprise risk operations.
• A proven record of building and scaling teams from a handful of engineers to dozens.
• Experience working in high-touch, forward-deployed or client-embedded engineering settings, such as tech consulting, forward-deployed AI or embedded business delivery pods.
• Excellent consultative problem-solving skills, with the ability to lead high-ambiguity discovery sessions with non-technical business executives.
• A demonstrated ability to attract, develop and keep senior engineering talent.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent experience is required. A master's degree is preferred.

Conditions

Full-time role based in the company London.

Hybrid working, with up to 2 days a week working from home.

An equal-opportunity employer; see the company's EEO Policy Statement and the Know Your Rights poster.

Benefits

• A competitive base salary, reviewed annually.
• A discretionary annual performance-related bonus.
• 27 days of annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Private medical care and life insurance.
• Employee assistance programme.
• Pension plan.
• Paid parental leave.
• Special discounts for employees, family and friends.