IFS

Forward Deployed Engineer — Platform (AI)

Staines-upon-Thames, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid · Full-time

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About the role

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EmployerIFS
LocationStaines-upon-Thames, England, United Kingdom
Work styleHybrid
Employment typeFull-time
Employer posted1 month ago

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, Platform, you embed directly with product development teams and customer organisations to understand real problems, design real solutions, and own the outcome. You are a force multiplier for developer velocity and platform adoption, working at the sharp end, in the code, unblocking teams, and building the patterns and tooling that make platform adoption feel effortless.

This is a high-agency role for a hands-on senior engineer who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast.

Embed directly with product teams and customer engineering organisations to maximise developer velocity and reduce GTM timelines
Lead technical discovery, identify the actual bottleneck, not the presenting symptom
Along with a dedicated Architecture team, design and build production-grade solutions on the IFS Cloud platform: workflows, integrations, event-driven patterns, and data pipelines
Identify, diagnose, and resolve platform friction points preventing teams from shipping at speed
Champion and implement event-driven architecture patterns across product teams
Build tooling, patterns, and reference implementations that accelerate adoption of Kairos and Nexus, reusable assets that scale your impact beyond the teams you work with directly
Ship a working first version fast, then harden it: proper monitoring, iteration based on real usage, production quality
Work alongside the dedicated NGA architecture team to drive the requirements for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), the core developer experience touchpoint through which product teams will consume Kairos and Nexus
Translate product team pain points into actionable platform feedback and roadmap input
Work directly with customer architects, IT leads, and business stakeholders, going deep in code while communicating clearly about trade-offs
Be the connective tissue between IFS R&D and the teams consuming the platform, your field insights shape what gets built next

Show full description

You have 5+ years of software development experience, with strong hands-on capability across the stack:

Backend: Go
Frontend: React (with Next.js)
Messaging / Streaming: Apache Kafka / RedPanda
Data: PostgreSQL

You’re comfortable operating in a cloud-native environment: Kubernetes, containers, GitOps, IaC, Software Defined Infrastructure
You have a solid understanding of event-driven and distributed systems architecture, and you apply it pragmatically in delivery contexts
You’ve built and owned production systems (not just prototypes) and know how to debug things that go wrong in the real world
You thrive in ambiguity, you can turn a fuzzy problem into a scoped, shipped system without waiting to be asked
You communicate well with non-technical stakeholders without dumbing it down
You have experience working in or alongside platform or infrastructure teams
Customer-facing technical work is in your background, you know how to build trust with engineering teams outside your own

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.

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