Lead Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer - AI / Agentic Engineering

Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2x on-site)

Type: Permanent, Full-time

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

SR2 is partnering with an exciting digital health technology company that works with pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare organisations to build AI and data-driven solutions addressing real-world challenges.

We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer who combines strong software engineering with hands-on experience building modern AI and agentic applications.

This is a builder-first role working closely with clients and product teams, take ambiguous problems, turn them into something concrete and then build, deploy and own the solution end-to-end.

What you'll be doing

• Work directly with business, technical and product stakeholders to understand complex problems and determine what should be built.
• Rapidly turn ideas into

working prototypes and production applications .

• Build full-stack applications, APIs, AI agents and multi-step workflows .
• Develop primarily with

Python and/or TypeScript .

• Build agentic applications using technologies such as LangGraph, AutoGen, Claude Agent SDK and OpenAI Assistants .
• Integrate

Claude, GPT, Gemini and open-weight models with external tools, data and systems.

• Work with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and custom connectors.
• Build

RAG and retrieval pipelines using vector databases such as Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate and pgvector.

• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure AI accuracy, reliability, latency and cost .
• Use modern AI development tools including

Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and Codex .

• Deploy and own applications in production across AWS, Azure, Cloudflare or Vercel .
• Work with

Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, testing, security and observability .

• Demo working software directly to stakeholders and iterate quickly based on feedback.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years' relevant experience building production applications using AI / agentic development approaches.
• Strong commercial experience with

Python and/or TypeScript .

• Hands-on experience building AI agents , rather than only working with prompted LLMs.
• Experience connecting models to tools and creating

multi-step agentic workflows .

• Strong understanding of modern LLMs and Generative AI .
• Experience with

RAG, vector databases and retrieval pipelines .

• Practical experience building and using AI evaluation harnesses .
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including

OOP, SOLID, clean architecture and microservices .

• Experience deploying applications into cloud environments.
• Understanding of

TDD, CI/CD, security, scalability and observability .

• Confidence working directly with stakeholders and turning ambiguous requirements into working software.
• Evidence of things you've recently built - whether commercially, through

GitHub, open-source projects, side projects or your own products .

• A degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related technical discipline .

Nice to have

• Healthcare or life-sciences experience.
• MLOps and model-serving experience.
• Data pipeline experience with technologies such as Spark, Airflow, Beam or Glue.
• Public writing, talks or contributions around AI engineering.
• Relevant AWS or cloud certifications.

Why consider it?

• Build at the forefront of AI and agentic software engineering .
• Take genuine ownership from

problem discovery through to production .

• Work directly with clients rather than being several layers removed from the problem.
• Build technology tackling meaningful challenges across healthcare and life sciences.
• Join an organisation investing in its growing UK engineering capability.
• Work alongside experienced international engineering, product and technology teams.
• Competitive compensation and opportunities for continued development.

Apply directly here or drop me your CV to adam.lockett@sr2rec.co.uk