Forward Deployed Engineer (UK Based)

Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

FDEs are how Duvo brings AI to life inside our customers. You sit at the front line, map their workflows on the Duvo platform, improve the underlying processes, and turn the result into running agents that deliver tangible business impact. Scoping, build, debug, handover, expansion. You own the customer outcome end to end and you own the relationship that goes with it.

You won't write the core product. You will write the glue: integration scripts, agent configurations, data transformations, prototypes, whatever it takes to get an agent running against a customer's actual systems. You'll spend real time inside their stack and inside their team.

If you like the messy middle between AI, process, and customer, this is the role.

You will be deployed directly with our clients, mostly in onsite/hybrid mode of work, you will travel a lot.

Location. This role is UK-based. You'll need to be living in the UK, or relocating there before you start, and able to travel to client sites from there.

What you'll do

• Embed with customers from kickoff through go-live and beyond
• Map customer workflows directly on the Duvo platform and decide what's worth automating, what's worth fixing first, and what's blocked
• Improve the underlying processes where it matters. Don't automate broken flows, redesign them
• Translate business logic into agent behavior: actions, decision rules, exception paths, fallbacks
• Configure and ship agents against real customer systems (ERPs, portals, spreadsheets, email, custom tools)
• Write integration code, scripts, and prototypes when the situation calls for it
• Debug live agents in production environments and iterate quickly
• Build and own the working relationship with customer stakeholders, from operators to sponsors
• Run working sessions, hold your own with technical counterparts, and earn the right to push back
• Make AI real for the customer. Move them from pilot energy to measurable business outcomes
• Capture reusable patterns, templates, and runbooks so the next deployment is faster
• Send recurring workflow patterns back to Product and Engineering as real signal

What success looks like

• Multiple agents in production across clients, with measurable business impact
• Customers point to specific KPIs that moved because of your work
• Customers treat you as a trusted operator and want you in the room
• Process improvements you drove are visible in the customer's day-to-day, not just in the agent
• Transformation Managers want you on their hardest accounts
• Accounts you own expand because the relationship and the results are both there
• Each deployment is faster than the last because you've left behind reusable assets

Who you are

Experience

5+ years in roles where you've shipped against real customer environments. We're prioritizing AI-native candidates: people who have been building, deploying, or operating AI and agentic systems in customer-facing settings, not adjacent to them.

Likely backgrounds

• Forward-deployed engineering or solutions engineering at an AI-first company
• Applied AI / ML engineering with direct customer exposure
• Technical consulting on AI or automation projects where you owned delivery and the client relationship
• Operations or product roles where you've built and shipped AI-powered tooling against messy real-world systems

Retail, e-commerce, or CPG background is a strong plus. Fluency in any operational domain (supply chain, procurement, category management, merchandising, finance ops, supplier management, warehousing) helps you ramp faster on customer accounts. What matters most is that you can pick up a new business quickly, see how to improve it, and build something with AI that actually works.

Skills

• Hands-on with modern AI tooling: LLMs, agent frameworks, prompt engineering, evals, MCP, retrieval
• Strong systems thinking and engineering judgment
• Process design instinct. You can spot waste, redundancy, and bad handoffs and propose something better
• Comfortable in code-adjacent territory: SQL, Python or JS scripting, APIs, JSON, webhooks, light data work
• Familiarity with ERPs and enterprise stacks is a plus
• Able to lead a working session, manage a stakeholder, push back on bad scope, and explain trade-offs without hiding behind jargon
• Fluent English. Additional European languages are a plus

Mindset

• Bias to ship
• Comfortable with ambiguity, half-built systems, and changing requirements
• Low ego, high standards
• Customer-obsessed. You build trust by being useful, not by being polished
• Commercially aware and able to help customers believe in what you're building
• Honest about what's working and what isn't

What we offer

• A small, sharp team that values ownership and candor
• Real product and culture leverage from day one
• Customer-facing impact: your work ships and moves the business
• Competitive comp including equity
• Option to trade cash for equity

HOW WE HIRE

We respect your time and aim to move fast

1. Screening call.

2. Hiring Manager call (online, 30 min). We'll talk about you, how you think and whether there's mutual fit.

3. Case study ( ~4 hours). Ship something small to production with us and see how we work together. Fully compensated

4. Final interview (online, 30min)

We're not looking for perfection. We're looking for someone who can walk into a customer's operation, figure out what matters, fix the process, ship the agent, and turn AI into outcomes the business can feel.