Forward Deployed Engineer

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

The Forward Deployed Engineer is Thought Machine's primary technical interface with the client. FDEs embed directly with client engineering teams to design, build, and deliver production-ready implementations of Vault and associated products. This is a hands-on, generalist engineering role that spans backend development, systems integration, infrastructure, and technical consulting—driven by one goal: making the client successful.

FDEs operate across the full project lifecycle ensuring requirements are implemented, tested and work to improve the product based on client feedback. You will be expected to travel to client sites (up to 25% of your time), work autonomously in complex environments, and act as the connective tissue between Thought Machine's product engineering and the client's delivery teams.

Duties

Client Delivery & Embedding

• Embed with client engineering teams on-site and remotely to deliver working implementations of Thought Machine Vault products, from initial design through production readiness.

• Own the technical success of your assigned client engagements—you are accountable for solutions that work in practice, not just in architecture documents.

• Work closely with client architects, engineers, and programme leads to translate business requirements into technical delivery plans.

• Act as technical point of contact for the client, building trust through deep competence and consistent delivery.

Engineering & Problem Solving

• Write production-quality code (primarily Python/Go; additional languages a plus) to build integrations, tooling, data pipelines, contribute to core products and extensions that connect Vault to the client's ecosystem.

• Debug, troubleshoot, and resolve complex technical issues across distributed systems—including databases, messaging systems, container orchestration, and cloud infrastructure.

• Design and deliver scalable solutions covering high availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and security in collaboration with client and internal teams.

• Contribute to internal tooling, frameworks, and reusable patterns that accelerate delivery across all FDE engagements.

Technical Consulting & Presales

• Support the Commercial team during presales by answering deep technical questions, running proof-of-concept implementations, and demonstrating feasibility.

• Advise clients on best practices for Vault implementation, including system design beyond Vault's boundaries—empowering genuine digital transformation.

Feedback & Product Improvement

• Serve as the voice of the client internally—channel technical feedback, pain points, and feature requests to product and engineering teams.

• Identify patterns across engagements that can be turned into product improvements, documentation, or shared tooling.

Requirements

Essential

• Engineering Proficiency – Strong hands-on experience with one of Python or Go. Comfortable working with ambiguous requirements to quickly iterate client ideas.

• Systems & infrastructure literacy – Working knowledge of Linux/Unix environments, container orchestration (Kubernetes), databases (PostgreSQL or equivalent), and messaging systems (Kafka or equivalent). You don't need to be a deep specialist in all of these, but you need to be familiar with the technologies.

• Cloud platform experience – Practical experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including deploying and operating workloads in production.

• Client-facing delivery experience – Demonstrated ability to work directly with external clients or partners in a technical delivery capacity. You can explain complex systems to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and you are comfortable owning outcomes.

• Project delivery mindset – Experience delivering technical projects end-to-end. You understand what it takes to move from design to production—not just the happy path, but the edge cases, rollback plans, and operability concerns.

Desirable

• Banking / Financial Services experience – Familiarity with retail banking, payments, ledgers, or regulatory environments. Understanding of the operational rigour expected in FSI.

• Cloud architecture certifications – AWS Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary

• Pension plan (match up to 5%)

• Life insurance - three times annual salary

• Competitive maternity (six months fully paid) and paternity leave (four weeks fully paid)

• Shared parental leave (matched to our maternity leave for the same point in time)

• 25 days holiday and bank holidays