Forward Deployed Engineer

Our Company

Hypership is an AI-native software consultancy with a mission to help businesses launch early enough to matter.

We build production-grade software for operationally complex businesses across the UK and North America - construction, healthcare, entertainment, government. Places where the deadline matters and the wrong build is more expensive than no build at all. Our average engagement is delivered to production in six weeks.

The Role

The role is Forward Deployed Engineer. An FDE is an engineer who works directly with a customer to build something from start to finish - business analyst, designer, developer, project manager, tester, all in one person.

Today, around a dozen of the most-watched companies in tech are hiring for this role. Most of them work for product companies, deploying that company's product into customer environments.

In the services industry, most consultancies hire engineers as a resource, and the model has been the same shape for decades. AI has made building faster - but it's also reinforced that the hard part of delivery was never the code. It was understanding the business, making the right decisions, and shipping something that holds up in a real environment.

That's the work an FDE does. Judgment, scoping, taste, client trust, and knowing when something is production-ready. If you're the kind of person who's already using AI to work differently - and you'd rather own the whole problem than wait for a ticket - this is the role for you.

Core Responsibilities

You'll spend most of your time on three things.

Understanding the problem. Forward deployed work means sitting close enough to the client to make their problem your problem. You'll run discovery, map systems, talk to stakeholders, and figure out what actually needs building before anyone writes a line of code.

Helping our customers. Honest recommendations on what to prioritise, what to buy instead of build, where the hard problems actually are. Most clients have never had that conversation with an engineer in plain English. They notice when they do.

AI-native delivery. You'll use agentic tooling as your default way of working. Speed comes from the tooling. Quality comes from you. You care as much about the non-functionals as the features.

Our Principles

We believe AI has fundamentally changed how software gets built.

We believe the engineers who'll thrive are the ones who get energy from the whole problem - not just the code, but the business, the users, and the messy bits in between.

We believe the best work happens when the engineer is close enough to the business to have an opinion about it.

What We Value

A real opinion about AI SDLC. A position you've actually stress-tested by trying things. We don't expect you to agree with us. We expect you to have thought about it harder than most.

Genuine curiosity outside the codebase. The best work comes from understanding how a business and their customers operate. We need someone who gets energy from the discovery, the stakeholder conversations, and the parts of the problem that don't look like engineering yet.

Demonstrable AI instincts. Have you actually run an agent in anger and learned something from it breaking? Tell us why you care more about harnesses than models.

Comfort being the only person on a project. Forward deployed work is often a team of one, with a client who's relying on you.

Intellectual honesty. The willingness to say "I don't know yet" when you don't. The willingness to change your mind when the evidence shifts.

What We Require

Full-stack with cloud experience is table stakes - we work across AWS, Azure, and Vercel depending on the client. We care more about how you work with people, and how you work with AI.

Belfast-based. We have an office. We don't expect anyone in five days a week, but this isn't a fully remote role - being able to sit with us, and more importantly with clients, matters for the work.

You must be eligible for UK security clearance (BPSS and SC). Some of our clients require it, and we need everyone on the team to be clearable.

What Happens When You Apply

We read every response. Promise.

If we want to keep talking, we'll set up a conversation. Not an interview in the traditional sense. We want to hear how you think about live problems we're working on right now, and you should come with questions of your own.

Offer Deadline

In an effort to build more insight into our recruitment process, we’d like to share our offer deadline expectations. By applying to this position, you commit to confirming your decision within two weeks of receiving your written offer.