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