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About the Role
We are seeking a visionary leader to build and scale a new Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) unit focused on Domain-Adapted Language Models (DALMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs). This founder role offers the opportunity to define the operating model, recruit the founding team, establish the technology stack, and drive client deployments within an established firm.
Responsibilities
- Be part of the management team, helping shape and launch new service propositions while driving strategic business growth.
- Lead business development initiatives —building trusted client relationships, owning outcomes, and delivering innovative, high-impact solutions.
- Collaborate with FTSE 100 clients as a respected advisor, guiding them through complex challenges with clarity and creativity.
- Support your team’s growth through coaching, knowledge-sharing, and creating opportunities for them to thrive.
- Contribute to thought leadership and the development of market-relevant offerings that showcase innovation and deliver value to clients.
- Build and lead the FDE unit, from a founding cohort of 8 to 12 engineers to a 100 plus person team within 24 months.
- Design the operating model: embedded deployment structure, delivery cadence, eval-driven quality gates, and commercial packaging including outcome-linked pricing.
- Stand up the DALM and SLM enablement stack: model selection, fine-tuning pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and secure deployment patterns for regulated clients, including on-premises and in-VPC serving.
- Own the productivity thesis. Define the metrics, instrument every deployment, and publish evidence of the multiplier FDEs achieve against baseline.
- Support our client Partners and lead the first deployments in priority sectors: data centres, semiconductors, water, and energy infrastructure.
- Set the hiring bar. Recruit fellow FDE engineers who ship production systems, upskill and transition existing engineers into FDEs, codify their patterns into reusable tooling and playbooks, and build the training pathway.
- Work with practice leadership on venture-style investment cases, lab and hyperscaler partnerships, and IP strategy.
Requirements
- A track record building and scaling engineering or applied AI teams, in consulting, a product company, an AI lab, or a venture environment.
- Hands-on credibility with modern AI engineering: LLM fine-tuning, RAG, agentic workflows, evaluation frameworks, and MLOps. Engineers must respect your technical judgement.
- Direct experience deploying small or domain-adapted models in enterprise settings, including cost, latency, security, and data residency trade-offs.
- Revenue ownership at £2-3m+, including shaping, pricing, and closing complex engagements.
- The instincts of a builder. You want to create something, put your name on it, and be measured on production outcomes.
Skills
- AI engineering
- LLM fine-tuning
- RAG
- Agentic workflows
- Evaluation frameworks
- MLOps
- Domain-Adapted Language Models (DALMs)
- Small Language Models (SLMs)
Location
- UK
- Ireland
- US
- Nordics
- Netherlands
Work Type
- Hybrid working
- Onsite
- Client site
Experience Level
- Consulting Director
- Founder role
Benefits
- Health and lifestyle perks accompanying private healthcare for you and your family
- 25 days annual leave (plus a bonus half day on Christmas Eve) with the opportunity to buy 5 additional days
- Generous company pension scheme
- Opportunity to get involved with community and charity-based initiatives
- Annual performance-based bonus
- PA share ownership
- Tax efficient benefits (cycle to work, give as you earn)
About the Company
- We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future.
- As strategies, technologies, and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity.
- Our teams of interdisciplinary experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough technologies to progress further, faster.
- Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results.
- We are over 4,000 strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers, and technologists.
- We have deep expertise in consumer and manufacturing, defence and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government and public services, health and life sciences, and transport.
- Our teams operate globally from offices across the UK, Ireland, US, Nordics, and Netherlands.
- PA. Bringing Ingenuity to Life.
Equal Opportunity
- We are committed to advancing equality. We recruit, retain, reward and develop our people based solely on their abilities and contributions and without reference to their age, background, disability, genetic information, parental or family status, religion or belief, race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity (or expression), political belief veteran status, or other by any other range of human difference brought about by identity and experience.
- We welcome applications from underrepresented groups.