Forward Deployed Engineers

Forward Deployed Engineer - 6-Month Contract Location: Hybrid - Hampshire/Fully Remote
Contract: 6 months
IR35: Outside IR35
Rate: £320 per day
Start: ASAP/September 2026
Duration: 6 months

The Opportunity
We're looking for two Forward Deployed Engineers to join a fast-growing bespoke software studio and support the delivery, productionisation and ongoing support of internally developed applications.
This is a hands-on role sitting at the intersection of software engineering, technical quality assurance, release management and application support.
You'll work closely with business users, citizen developers and engineering teams, acting as a technical quality gate to ensure applications are safe, robust and ready for production.
You'll be comfortable picking up unfamiliar codebases, reviewing code, validating deployments, troubleshooting issues and making targeted improvements where required.

What You'll Be Doing

• Supporting applications through development, testing and into production
• Reviewing code, infrastructure and configuration changes before deployment
• Validating deployments and ensuring solutions meet functional and technical expectations
• Troubleshooting deployment, integration and application issues
• Investigating defects and implementing safe, low-risk fixes
• Delivering small enhancements and product improvements
• Providing technical QA across a portfolio of applications
• Working directly with business users and citizen developers
• Identifying technical risks and preventing poor-quality solutions reaching production
• Supporting best practices around testing, deployment and technical governance
• Using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, investigation and troubleshooting

What We're Looking For
You'll be a pragmatic, adaptable engineer who enjoys working across different technologies and environments.

Essential technical experience

• Strong commercial experience with JavaScript and TypeScript
• Experience building and maintaining modern web applications, particularly Next.js
• Strong understanding of full-stack web application architecture
• Experience with PostgreSQL and SQL
• Ability to understand, troubleshoot and modify unfamiliar codebases
• Strong HTML, CSS and responsive design knowledge
• Experience translating requirements and designs into production-ready applications
• A strong testing mindset, including unit and integration testing
• Experience with testing frameworks such as Vitest or Jest
• Understanding of end-to-end testing and deployment validation
• Experience with Git-based workflows
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and release processes
• Experience supporting applications across development, testing and production environments
• Ability to diagnose deployment and configuration issues

AI & modern development You'll also be comfortable using modern AI-assisted development tooling, such as:

• Claude
• Cursor
• GitHub Copilot
• VS Code Agent Mode/AI Agents

You should understand how to use AI-generated code responsibly, with appropriate engineering review, testing and validation.

Desirable Experience with:

• Next.js
• AWS
• Cloudflare
• Supabase
• Low-code/citizen developer environments
• Automated testing and test automation

The Person We're looking for someone who is:

• Analytical and highly capable at solving technical problems
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and unfamiliar systems
• Detail-oriented, with strong engineering judgement
• Confident communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Pragmatic about balancing speed, quality and risk
• Collaborative and willing to support and upskill others
• Comfortable operating across multiple technical stacks and learning quickly

Why Join? You'll be joining a dynamic, late-stage software business experiencing significant growth, working on bespoke solutions that deliver real commercial value for clients.
This is an excellent opportunity for an engineer who enjoys variety, autonomy and solving real-world technical problems, rather than being restricted to a single product or technology stack.

£320 per day | Outside IR35 | 6-month contract | Hybrid Havant or fully remote

If you're a hands-on full-stack engineer with strong JavaScript/TypeScript experience and an interest in AI-assisted development, we'd love to hear from you.