Forward Deployed Engineer

Salary: £90,000-£150,000 basic salary + up to 25% performance-based bonus

Security Clearance: Must be eligible for SC clearance

Sector: AI / Defence / National Security

About the Company

Sellick Partnership is working with an innovative AI defence company developing advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for customers operating across Defence, Security and Resilience.

With foundations across natural language processing, computational linguistics and graph technology, the business is increasingly developing capabilities across agentic AI, knowledge representation and next-generation sovereign AI.

The organisation brings together experienced technologists and domain specialists to build AI solutions that help customers process complex information and turn large volumes of multimodal data into actionable intelligence.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Forward Deployed Engineer to design, build and deploy sophisticated software and AI capabilities that solve complex, real-world customer problems across Defence, Security and Resilience.

This is a highly technical, hands-on position spanning software engineering, backend development, cloud infrastructure and AI/ML.

You will work closely with customers, analysts, engineers and AI/ML researchers to understand mission requirements and turn them into secure, scalable and deployable capabilities.

The role would suit an experienced engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous technical problems, taking ownership of solutions and working closely with end users rather than operating solely within a traditional software development environment.

Key Responsibilities

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will:

• Own backend, infrastructure and AI/ML platform components supporting mission deployments.
• Design, build and deploy scalable backend services, APIs and data pipelines.
• Work with multimodal data including text, multimedia and geospatial sources.
• Develop AI-driven capabilities incorporating agentic workflows, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Large Language Models (LLMs) and advanced Natural Language Processing.
• Collaborate with AI/ML researchers to operationalise models, from fine-tuning through to deployment within government environments.
• Engineer secure and resilient solutions that meet HMG compliance and assurance requirements.
• Work directly with mission owners, analysts and end users to understand requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Conduct user testing and deliver deployable capabilities into customer environments.
• Identify opportunities for newly developed capabilities to be scaled and productised into reusable software workflows.
• Lead and contribute to technical initiatives spanning multiple systems and engineering teams.
• Travel to customer locations when required, with travel potentially accounting for up to 20% of the role.

We are looking for candidates who can demonstrate:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience designing and delivering production-grade software at scale.
• Excellent system design skills, including the ability to make informed decisions around performance, reliability, scalability and cost.
• Hands-on experience architecting systems capable of handling multiple data modalities.
• Experience with container orchestration and deploying applications across different infrastructure environments.
• Recent practical experience building with AI agent frameworks .
• Strong understanding of APIs and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building or implementing modern AI/ML capabilities.
• Experience leading cross-team technical initiatives and influencing technical adoption.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to engineers, stakeholders and end users.

AI & Emerging Technology

Candidates should ideally have hands-on experience across areas such as:

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Agentic AI and agent frameworks
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Experience using modern AI development tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor would also be highly beneficial.

Security Clearance

Due to the nature of the projects and customers involved, candidates must be eligible to obtain UK Security Check (SC) clearance .

The successful candidate will be working within the UK Defence and National Security environment, so the ability to satisfy the relevant security vetting requirements is essential.

Package

• Up to 25% performance-based bonus
• Opportunity to work on advanced AI technology within the UK Defence and National Security sector
• Exposure to mission-critical government programmes and complex technical environments
• Opportunity to work across software engineering, cloud infrastructure and cutting-edge AI

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