Forward Deployed Engineer

Embed with our wealth management customers across the UK. Scope agentic AI projects directly with senior business stakeholders, then design, train and ship the systems that solve them. Pure Python, ML engineering and customer ownership in one role.

Palindrome is the agentic operating system for modern wealth management. Our platform pairs always-on AI agents with adviser, compliance and operations teams across firms managing combined assets of over £70 billion. We are a Microsoft Agentic Launchpad cohort company alongside NVIDIA, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 certified, and selected for the FCA's AI Live Testing programme.

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineering is the function that turns Palindrome from product into production outcomes. You will sit at the intersection of customer, product and ML, scoping agentic AI projects directly with the customer, then designing, training, evaluating and shipping the systems that solve them.

This is not a delivery role and it is not pure research. You will write the Python that runs in production, own technical decisions end-to-end, and be the engineer the customer trusts to make the call when something needs to change.

What you'll do

• Scope agentic AI projects directly with C-suite, heads of compliance and senior advisers. Translate ambiguous business problems into well-defined ML systems.
• Design, train and evaluate agentic systems for real customer workflows, document generation, file reviews, fact-find capture, suitability writing, compliance monitoring, next-best actions.
• Deploy Palindrome inside the customer's own Azure tenant using Entra ID, Key Vault, private VNets and Azure AI Foundry. Operate it from day one.
• Own the eval loop. Define the metrics, build the test sets, measure model behaviour against customer ground truth, iterate.
• Build reusable Python abstractions from what you see in the field and push them into the core platform, every customer makes the next deployment faster.
• Carry the pager when your customer needs it. Raise the bar on quality and on what is possible when something breaks.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years building software in production, ideally at the senior or staff level.
• Strong in Python. You will write Python daily, backend services, agents, evals, data pipelines.
• Hands-on ML engineering experience: trained, evaluated and deployed models in production, not just used them via an API.
• Real comfort with cloud infrastructure. Azure preferred; AWS or GCP experience translates well.
• Excellent written communication and the credibility to sit opposite a CTO or head of compliance. Scoping from a blank page is part of the job.
• Real opinions on agentic AI patterns: tool use, retrieval, multi-step reasoning, evals, guardrails.
• Customer-facing experience preferred. Wealth, fintech or another regulated industry is a strong plus.

Stack and tools

Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, async stack), Azure (App Services, Functions, AI Foundry, Key Vault, Entra ID, Private VNet), Postgres, OpenAI and Anthropic models, evaluation frameworks for agentic systems, Microsoft Graph (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint), CRM integrations including XPLAN, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Plannr and Intelliflo.

What we offer

• Competitive base salary with meaningful equity in an early-stage company on a sharp growth trajectory.
• High-trust environment. Minimal process, maximum ownership.
• Direct exposure to senior leadership at the largest UK wealth firms.
• Microsoft Agentic Launchpad cohort, access to the Microsoft, NVIDIA and partner network.
• London office presence with travel to client sites across the UK.