As a Lead - Forward Deployed Engineer at realfast.ai with 7–10 years of software engineering experience, you will lead the end-to-end lifecycle of high-complexity projects. A battle-tested engineer who can code like hell, understands what makes businesses tick, and can elevate an entire team while doing it.
You'll lead a team of Forward Deployed Engineers on client projects, working hand-in-hand with AI Transformation Leads to deliver software and products that help clients achieve their business goals. You'll own high-complexity projects end-to-end — driving product and technical design, navigating trade-offs, and ensuring timely delivery that upholds our standards of innovation and excellence.
This is a natural career progression from the FDE role. Like FDEs, you'll be deeply embedded in client work — but you'll also bring back learnings, patterns, and insights that have a significant impact on the platform we're building.
What You'll Do
- Lead client engagements, driving delivery and raising the bar on engineering excellence
- Partner with AI Transformation Leads to design and deliver solutions that achieve client business outcomes
- Work directly with customers and stakeholders — including users, data scientists, and cross-functional teams — to design and implement solutions
- Prioritise strategically, balancing quality, technical debt, and delivery timelines
- Champion delivery excellence by boosting predictability, quality, and throughput
- Deconstruct complex engineering problems and deliver robust solutions
- Improve code architecture with a focus on testability and maintainability
- Make smart trade-offs between beautiful code and shipping fast — we bias toward shipping
- Unblock and support team members to address challenges impacting delivery
- Set the standard for engineering best practices and first-principles thinking — be someone the team looks up to in terms of craft
- Build AI-powered solutions, including developing, fine-tuning, and integrating LLMs to enhance products, automate tasks, and drive innovation
- Feed learnings back to the platform — identify patterns, gaps, and opportunities from client work that shape the evolution of our platform
- Help build the team by mentoring engineers and finding other smart people
What You'll BringExperience
- 7–10 years of software engineering experience
- Deep expertise with a proven track record in a similar lead role
- Experience building applications from scratch using object-oriented languages (e.g., Ruby, Python)
- Experience solving 0-to-1 problems, identifying Product-Market Fit, and iterating with users to deliver solutions
- Strong proficiency across multiple programming languages and paradigms — it doesn't matter which
Technical Skills
- Exceptional grasp of software engineering principles
- Comprehensive understanding of engineering systems and architecture
- Hands-on across the full stack — front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models
- Appreciation for how businesses make money using technology as a lever
Leadership & Communication
- Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to lead by example in technical and operational excellence
- Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to team growth
- Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
- Leadership qualities: integrity, compassionate collaboration, and thorough preparedness
Mindset
- Comfortable working in a dynamic environment with ambiguity
- Strong grit and drive to make an impact
- Self-starter who can operate without detailed specs or extensive guidance
This role is for you if
- You're a polyglot engineer who loves to create working solutions, not just write code
- You're excited about building systems where AI owns concrete business outcomes
- You want to take state-of-the-art research into reliable production software
- You're interested in the business side of technology, not just the technical aspects
- You want to lead, mentor, and grow a team of high-calibre engineers
- You enjoy turning client-facing experience into platform improvements that scale
This role is NOT for you if
- You want a strictly defined role with clear boundaries
- You need detailed specs before you can start building anything
- You need extensive guidance and structure to be productive
- You're looking for a purely coding-focused position
- You prefer to specialise deeply in one technical area rather than being versatile
