Log In
Sign Up
Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: Bristol, UK, with regular travel to MOD and end-user sites across the UK
Employment type: Permanent, full-time
Security clearance: Must be a UK national, eligible for SC as a minimum
Reporting to: Head of Capability
About Intellium AI
Intellium AI is a Bristol-based sovereign AI company delivering mission-critical capabilities to the UK Ministry of Defence and the wider national security community. We were founded on the belief that the UK needs a genuinely British Defence AI: a company that builds, owns and evolves its own AI products and puts them in the hands of those who need them most.
The role
The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) sits at the point where our products meet the mission. You will embed with the end user organisations, rapidly understand their hardest problems, and design, build, configure and deploy solutions on top of our product suite that measurably improve their operational output.
This is not a pre-sales role, a solutions architecture role, or a traditional consulting role. It is an engineering role with an operational mandate. You will own the technical relationship with the customer from first workshop to live deployment, and you will bring what you learn in the field back into our core product roadmap.
If the idea of deploying AI onto a classified network at a military site, watching an analyst cut a two-day task down to twenty minutes, and then driving the next product iteration to make it even better sounds like the best week you could have at work, this role is for you.
What you will do
• Embed with the customer. Spend meaningful time on Authority sites and classified networks. Sit next to the analysts, operators and commanders who use our software. Understand their workflows, their constraints, their data and their tradecraft well enough to speak their language.
• Deploy our products. Configure and integrate our products into customer environments, from cloud to on-premise to the tactical edge. Own the deployment from infrastructure through to user acceptance.
• Build bespoke capability on our platform. Extend our products with customer-specific workflows, RAG pipelines, agentic tooling, data connectors, knowledge graphs and reporting templates. Write production code. Ship it.
• Close the loop with product engineering. Feed real operational insight back into the Intellium product roadmap. You are the reason our next release is better than our last one.
• Own the outcome. Define success metrics with the user. Track them. Hold yourself accountable to them. A deployed product that nobody uses is a failure, and we treat it as one.
• Represent Intellium with credibility. You will be in rooms with Authority technical leads, senior military officers, programme managers and delivery partners. You will be a face of the company.
What we are looking forEssential
• UK national, eligible for SC clearance as a minimum
• Strong software engineering background: comfortable writing production Python, with working knowledge of one or more of TypeScript, Java or C++
• Hands-on experience deploying AI or ML systems into real environments, not just prototypes. You have seen what breaks between a notebook and a running service, and you know how to fix it
• Practical experience with modern AI patterns: RAG, agentic architectures, evaluation, or fine-tuning of LLMs
• Fluency with the modern deployment stack: containers, Kubernetes or equivalent, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and at least one cloud provider
• Willingness and ability to travel regularly to customer sites across the UK, including military bases and classified facilities
• Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain a software pipeline to an intelligence analyst, and an intelligence workflow to a machine learning engineer, without losing either of them
Highly desirable
• Existing SC or DV clearance
• Prior experience delivering into UK MOD, UK Intelligence Community, or allied defence customers
• Edge deployment experience: constrained compute, disconnected or degraded networks, tactical environments
• Service background, or a track record of working closely with military, intelligence or law enforcement end users
• Experience with MLOps tooling and platforms, or with building them
How you work
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete requirements. You go and find the answer
• You take ownership end-to-end. “That is not my job” is not in your working vocabulary
• You are genuinely curious about the operational domain, not just the technology
• You are honest about what you know, what you do not, and what you need to go and learn
Why Intellium
• Genuine impact. Our software is in daily use supporting real military intelligence work. You will see the result of your code in a way that is rare in this industry.
• Sovereign AI, built in Britain. We are one of a small number of UK SMEs with serious traction in defence AI. We are not a wrapper on top of a US platform. We build our own products, and we own our own destiny.
• Breadth of scope. Within a small team, you will touch more of the problem than you ever would at a prime or a consultancy. If you want to grow quickly, this is the environment for it.
• Prime office location. We have recently expanded in Bristol city centre, and we are building a team culture, not a remote-first abstraction.
Compensation and benefits
• Competitive base salary, calibrated to experience and clearance
• Meaningful EMI share options
• Pension contribution
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• A genuine commitment to your growth
Intellium AI is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates who meet the UK nationality requirement for the clearance level of this role.
