Forward Deployed Engineer Contract

Job title: Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract)
Type: Contract Outside IR35
Start: Immediate
Length: Three months with potential to extend

Location: Within 50 miles of an office Edinburgh Newcastle Leeds Manchester or London. Remote with occasional in-person client sessions

Were looking for a contract Forward Deployed Engineer to lead the earliest stage of a new client engagement.

Youll be the first engineer in before theres a delivery team or a plan.

The client wants to know whats possible. Your job is to work that out then build the proof a delivery team can scale from.

Its hands-on technical work with a lot of direct client contact.

Why youd want this

You decide how the work gets done.

We dont lock AI tools behind governance and access controls. Use whatever tools suit the problem swap them wire them into your stack. No permission needed.

On a recent 19-week build an AI insights platform producing multilingual analysis from complex data AI was embedded from day three and 80.5% of authored commits carried verifiable AI co-authorship.

About hedgehog lab

Were a UK digital product consultancy and a certified B Corp with 20 years behind us and offices in Edinburgh Newcastle Leeds Manchester and London.

Our client work spans healthcare commerce media and education.

What the engagement covers

• Turning the clients goals into a solution architecture and technology choices

• Building proofs of concept that validate the design and hand off cleanly

• Defining the agentic engineering pipeline: tooling workflows and guardrails for AI coding agents

• Setting the quality approach including testing and code review

• Knowledge transfer through pairing leaving patterns the clients engineers can own

• Producing the architectural decision records

Who this suits

Youll be in front of the client from the first week.

Shaping unclear problems and explaining your thinking to non-technical people is a big part of the work. If youd rather stay heads-down coding this one wont suit you.

Experience youll need

• Real experience using AI agents to build production software

• A track record of breaking down poorly defined problems and shipping something that works

• Strong TypeScript or Python across the full stack with frameworks such as NestJS or FastAPI

• Experience working with and presenting to clients directly

• Clear written communication especially ADRs and docs others rely on

• Consulting professional services or forward-deployed experience

• A practical approach to architecture sized to POC pilot or production

How to apply

Apply below with your day rate and availability or get in touch if youd like to talk it through first.