Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

About Malted

Malted builds specialised customer interaction intelligence for financial institutions. Our platform combines advanced language technology with deep domain understanding to help firms make faster, more accurate decisions.

Our proprietary technology, purpose built for financial services, uncovers signals that generic AI misses, and we work hand in hand with our clients to turn that into decisions and actions that deliver meaningful impact.

We’re a small, passionate and highly technical team based in Edinburgh, combining deep machine learning expertise and financial services specific domain knowledge with a rigorous approach to product design, delivery and client outcomes.

About the team

You'll sit in the Forward Deployed team, reporting to the Chief Forward Deployed Engineer and partnering with Senior Forward Deployed Strategists and our customers to drive value. You'll work closely with Product Engineering and our Information Security lead, and you'll be the bridge between what clients need and what the platform does. As client demand grows you'll help build out the Forward Deployed Engineering team.

What you’ll do

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you are a technical lead for Malted's customers, owning the technical path from initial discovery through to measurable value in production. You take on loosely defined customer problems, such as unfamiliar data landscapes, stalled deployments or demanding security reviews, and drive them to resolution. You operate autonomously and define what needs to be built for a customer, not just how to build it.

This is a hands on technical leadership role. You'll work directly with senior client stakeholders across IT, data, architecture and InfoSec, and agree a single plan with the Senior Forward Deployed Strategist on each account so technical and business delivery move together.

You'll work across the stack: architecting deployments, building data pipelines and integrations, configuring the Malted Platform, and calibrating, optimising and testing AI models. You're the go to person when any of this is technically hard. Where a customer need isn't yet supported by the Platform, you'll prototype solutions and turn them into concrete proposals and contributions to the core Platform with Product Engineering.

Your goal is to get customers live quickly and maximise the long term value they get from Malted, finding where value is blocked and fixing the cause rather than the symptom.

Responsibilities

Technical discovery and solution architecture

• Lead technical discovery with senior client IT, data, architecture and InfoSec stakeholders, and turn what you find into a clear technical plan.

• Architect solutions for complex customer environments that are simple to understand, safe to operate and easy to change.

• Agree a single plan with the Senior Forward Deployed Strategist on your accounts, defining technical scope, feasibility and success criteria for pilot design, onboarding and expansion before commitments are made.

Data integration, ingestion and transformation

• Own ingestion design across the deployment lifecycle, including bulk ingestion for the pilot, filling data gaps during deployment and reliable regular ingestion in production.

• Solve the hardest data integration problems, where client data sources, formats or delivery mechanisms don't fit standard approaches.

• Build data quality, completeness and integrity checks in from the start, setting the standard future FDEs will follow.

Customer-specific AI configuration and calibration

• Lead configuration and calibration of Malted's models and outputs for complex clients, working with our AI researchers.

• Agree evaluation criteria with the client and prove, with evidence, that outputs meet them before and after go-live.

Infrastructure, integrations and security

• Design deployments to meet security, compliance and financial services requirements from the start, working alongside Malted’s Information Security lead.

• Own the technical integration with complex client environments, covering deployment, connectivity, access controls and integration of Malted outputs back into client systems and workflows, balancing speed to value with scalability and maintainability.

• Set the standard for operational excellence on client deployments: systems are observable, changes are safe to deploy, and incidents are treated as learning. Lead resolution when complex production issues hit a client.

Prototyping

• Prototype quickly against real client data to prove an approach before it's built properly.

• Feed client data patterns, edge cases and recurring requirements back to Product Engineering, and drive the productisation of repeatable solutions into the core Malted Platform.

• Set the standard for documenting data mappings, configurations and client specific integration details so deployments can be supported and repeated.

Communication and collaboration

• Be the senior technical point of contact for your accounts, communicating progress and blockers proactively to stakeholders.

• Set the standard for how deployments are engineered at Malted, and help build the Forward Deployed Engineering team and capability.

Who you are

You are a seasoned engineer who is as comfortable in a room with a client's head of data as you are in the codebase. You have led technical deployments into complex enterprise environments, and you know the hard part is rarely the code, it's the undocumented data, the security review no one planned for, and the gap between what the client asked for and what they need. You move fast with prototypes and take care where production systems demand it. You'd rather build something once into the platform than maintain ten bespoke versions.

Minimum requirements

• Eligible to work in the UK.

• 6+ years of professional software or data engineering experience, including significant time in a client-facing technical role such as forward deployed engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting or implementation.

• Strong experience in Python (or another language) and confidence working across the full stack.

• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production data pipelines and system integrations (ETL/ELT, APIs, batch and streaming).

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs and database design (SQL/NoSQL).

• Experience deploying into enterprise environments with strict security requirements, including supporting client InfoSec and due diligence reviews.

• Track record of leading technical discovery and owning solution architecture end to end on complex client engagements.

• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with product and engineering teams to deliver client outcomes, and to lead by example and mentor other engineers.

• Able to travel within the UK for client meetings.

Preferred requirements

• Experience with Financial Services or other regulated, sensitive data environments (compliance, InfoSec processes).

• Experience turning bespoke client solutions into reusable platform capabilities.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and containerised deployment.

• Experience in an early-stage or Series A environment.

Working at Malted

We’re based in Edinburgh and work from the office three days a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday). The rest of the week is work from home. This role also involves regular travel within the UK for client meetings.

We keep a high bar for technical quality but a low tolerance for ego. You’ll join a team that values precision, humour and intellectual honesty.

Benefits

• Competitive salary

• Pension and stock options

• Medical and life insurance

• Enhanced Family Leave entitlement

• Cycle to Work Salary Sacrifice Scheme

• Hybrid working and ad-hoc flexibility

• The chance to work on one-of-a-kind products at the forefront of the AI industry

• Professional development and growth opportunities

• A collaborative, inclusive workplace that promotes innovation and teamwork

• Free snacks and drinks

• Social events and company outings

• Relocation assistance for candidates moving to Edinburgh

Note: Malted AI is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

We aren’t working with recruiters for these positions — we’re excited to connect directly with candidates who share our enthusiasm for small language AI models to deliver client focused solutions to complex problems and opportunities.