Forward Deployed Software Engineer

About us Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more. We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator. The role We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) to join our product engineering team. This is an engineering-first role: FDSEs are the technical owners who take the Encord platform into our most strategic and advanced customer environments, working directly with clients' engineering teams to identify problems and design, build, and ship the solutions that solve them.

As an early member of the Forward Deployed team, you'll have an outsized impact on shaping a critical function for Encord and our customers, in a role that combines hands-on engineering with direct client ownership. You’ll do tough system design calls under real customer load, and customers will trust you to get their hardest integration and workflow problems actually solved. You’ll operate autonomously, defining your own path to a solution, managing client relationships directly, and feeding what you learn straight back into the product roadmap.

What you'll do

• Design and ship high-quality, production-grade code that integrates Encord into customers' most complex data and ML pipelines

• Own system design decisions for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, and speed

• Work directly with clients' engineering teams to diagnose problems, scope solutions, and ship fixes end-to-end

• Build data integrations and technical solutions that support customer onboarding, adoption, and scale at pace

• Communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to both engineering counterparts and non-technical stakeholders

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy: identify the right problem to solve, decide how to solve it, and see it through with minimal oversight

• Collaborate with product and engineering to feed customer insights back into the roadmap

• Help define and scale the Forward Deployed function as an early team member

Who we're looking for

• Design and ship high-quality, production-grade code that integrates Encord into customers' most complex data and ML pipelines

• Own system design decisions for customer deployments, balancing correctness, scalability, and speed

• Work directly with clients' engineering teams to diagnose problems, scope solutions, and ship fixes end-to-end

• Build data integrations and technical solutions that support customer onboarding, adoption, and scale at pace

• Communicate technical plans and tradeoffs clearly to both engineering counterparts and non-technical stakeholders

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy: identify the right problem to solve, decide how to solve it, and see it through with minimal oversight

• Collaborate with product and engineering to feed customer insights back into the roadmap

• Help define and scale the Forward Deployed function as an early team member

Experience requirements

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals

• Experience building production software across the stack, including product-facing applications, APIs, backend services, and data workflows

• Strong system design judgment and experience making architecture decisions for complex software

• Strong coding skills in a modern language; Python is a plus

• Evidence of owning technical problems end to end, from design through production

• Strong product judgement, communication, and stakeholder management

• Experience working directly with users, customers, or external engineering teams is a plus

• Bonus: experience in a high-growth startup, developer platform, or ML/data product environment

Why Encord

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup

• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week

• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays

• Annual learning & development budget

• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe

• Daily company lunches

• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites