Senior Forward Deployed Engineer - Vice President

Description

The company is building agentic AI and has an Applied AI and Agents Factory that turns advanced AI capabilities into production-ready solutions.

You will work as a hands-on senior engineer embedded in Line of Business squads, building production-grade agent reasoning logic, custom tool integrations, data retrieval pipelines and resilient execution workflows that meet enterprise safety, security and quality standards.

The work goes beyond chat tools: agents that reason, plan and carry out multi-step workflows, with integration into enterprise systems and reliable behaviour in production.

The Factory emphasises hands-on engineering, collaboration and quick delivery. You will solve hard technical problems, grow your expertise and contribute reusable tools and engineering practices that help AI adoption across the company.

This role suits someone who wants to build, deploy and scale AI systems that deliver real business value, not only experiment.

Responsibilities

• Write clean, modular Python for agent reasoning loops, dynamic tool calling, short- and long-term memory and sub-agent delegation.
• Build and maintain custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and API connectors that link agents to ticketing systems, databases, message queues and internal REST or gRPC microservices.
• Develop and tune Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) components: document parsing, embeddings, vector indexing, metadata filtering and semantic search.
• Add resilient error handling: retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers, fallback routines and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) escalation for ambiguous model outputs.
• Build deterministic validation layers with Pydantic and JSON Schema so non-deterministic foundation model outputs are structured and type-safe.
• Integrate real-time guardrails for prompt injection, jailbreak mitigation and automated PII filtering or redaction into agent execution loops.
• Work with C12 engineers to build automated regression testbeds, curate golden datasets and add evaluation suites to CI/CD release pipelines.
• Take part in agile sprints, problem-solving sessions and peer code reviews, and coach junior engineers on craftsmanship.
• Sit with Line of Business users such as traders, bankers and analysts to watch their daily workflows and capture domain logic and edge cases.
• Build, test and refine working agent prototypes and prompt chains using daily feedback from business pilot users.
• Review user interaction logs and feedback to find model failures, unclear prompts and UI friction, then improve agent reasoning.
• Assess risk carefully when making business decisions, protecting the firm's reputation, clients and assets. Comply with laws, rules, regulations and Policy, use sound ethical judgment, and escalate, manage and report control issues openly.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 4+ years of strong professional Python, Java or Go.
• 1, 2+ years of hands-on work with foundation model APIs, such as centralised enterprise AI gateways, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI or Anthropic, and integrating LLMs into backend services.
• Solid experience with REST or gRPC API development, Docker, Git workflows, Linux and CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven understanding of advanced prompt engineering, structured output parsing, vector databases and retrieval strategies.
• Experience working directly with business stakeholders, product managers or operational users in rapid, iterative delivery.
• Bachelor's degree or university degree, or equivalent experience. A Master's degree is preferred.

Conditions

Full-time role based in the company London.

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

Embedded in Line of Business squads as a new venture with changing daily challenges.

Please see the requirements above for the most relevant skills; contact the recruiter for complementary skills.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and reviews applicants without regard to protected characteristics.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary, reviewed annually.
• Discretionary annual performance-related bonus.
• 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Private medical care and life insurance.
• Employee assistance programme.
• Pension plan.
• Paid parental leave.
• Discounts for employees, family and friends.
• Access to the company's Global Benefits page for more detail.