Job description
Forward Deployed Engineer
Company Overview
AI Futures are supporting a search for a Forward Deployed Engineer. This is a rare opportunity to join a profitable and scaling business. The company is making major investments in data infrastructure, analytics, and AI to power its next phase of growth.
Job Summary
The Forward Deployed Engineer will sit at the centre of it: half the time embedded with stakeholders and key commercial partners solving real integration problems, the rest of the time building the tools, prototypes, and platform improvements that make those solutions reusable at scale.
Key Responsibilities
- Own technical delivery end-to-end - from discovery and scoping through to production roll out - for our client's most strategic data and AI integrations.
- Embed directly with partner and internal teams to understand real workflows, debug live issues, and design solutions that actually get adopted.
- Build prototypes, internal tools, and reusable building blocks that turn one-off fixes into platform capability.
- Spot patterns across multiple deployments and feed them back into product and engineering priorities - you're often the first to see where the platform needs to evolve.
- Make fast, pragmatic trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality, and know when to write the code yourself to keep momentum.
- Act as a trusted technical partner - equally credible in a whiteboard session with engineers and a working session with a commercial stakeholder.
Requirements / Qualifications
- 5+ years of software or data engineering experience, including meaningful time in a customer or stakeholder facing technical role.
- Strong, hands-on coding ability across the stack - Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or comparable languages - and the judgment to know what production-grade looks like.
- Comfort with ambiguity: you can walk into a messy, half-defined problem and bring structure to it without waiting for someone else to define the brief.
- A genuine curiosity that spans the stack - from data pipelines and infrastructure to the application layer and the AI/ML systems sitting on top of it.
- A "PM hat" - the instinct to spot the pattern behind five separate requests and turn it into one good platform decision.
- Excellent communication across very different audiences: deeply technical engineers on one side, commercial and operational stakeholders on the other.
- A bias toward action and a founder mindset - you stay with a problem until it's actually solved, not just handed off.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with large-scale data platforms, streaming pipelines, or AI/ML systems in production.
- Prior experience in a founding engineer, solutions engineering, or forward-deployed type role.
Location
Ruhr Region, Germany (Hybrid)
Salary & Benefits
