About the role
We’re looking for a Forward Deployment Engineer to work at the intersection of engineering, product and the business.
As a Forward Deployment Engineer, you will take technology from prototype to production by working directly with internal stakeholders to understand real-world problems, rapidly build and integrate solutions, and deploy them into production environments.
This is a highly hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys operating close to the customer, moving quickly from ambiguity to working software, and taking ownership beyond writing code.
You will partner with product managers, engineers, architects, data specialists and business stakeholders to identify opportunities, develop solutions, validate them in real environments and scale successful implementations across NatWest.
What you’ll do
- Work directly with business and product teams to understand complex problems and translate them into technical solutions.
- Rapidly prototype, build and deploy production-quality applications and integrations.
- Own solutions end-to-end - from discovery and technical design through development, deployment, adoption and continuous improvement.
- Embed with teams and operate close to the problem rather than working purely as a central engineering function.
- Integrate applications with existing platforms, APIs, data sources and enterprise systems.
- Develop reusable components, services and patterns that can be scaled across teams.
- Work across the full engineering lifecycle, including coding, testing, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring and production support.
- Diagnose technical issues in live environments and work collaboratively to resolve them.
- Partner with architecture, security, platform and infrastructure teams to ensure solutions meet enterprise standards.
- Use data, experimentation and user feedback to iterate rapidly and demonstrate measurable impact.
- Help identify where emerging technologies, including AI and GenAI, can solve meaningful business problems.
- Document solutions and share learnings so successful approaches can be adopted more broadly.
- Influence engineering practices and contribute to a strong engineering culture.
What we’re looking for
Engineering
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience building production applications.
- Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go or C#.
- Strong proficiency in AI/ML, GenAI, LLM applications, AI agents and Data engineering or analytics
- Experience designing and consuming REST APIs, microservices and distributed systems.
- Experience with cloud technologies, preferably GCP, AWS or Azure.
- Strong understanding of databases, data structures and system integration.
- Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing and modern software development practices.
- Understanding of observability, logging, monitoring and production troubleshooting.
- Experience working with containers and/or Kubernetes.
Forward deployment mindset
- Comfortable working with ambiguity and turning loosely defined problems into working solutions.
- Able to move quickly between discovery, prototyping and production engineering.
- Strong customer and stakeholder orientation.
- Comfortable working directly with senior business and technical stakeholders.
- Able to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
- Strong problem-solving and debugging capability.
- Pragmatic: knows when to build quickly, when to engineer for scale and when to reuse an existing capability.
- Takes ownership for outcomes rather than only technical deliverables.
Advantageous experience
Experience in one or more of the following would be valuable:
- Cloud-native application development
- API and platform integration
- DevOps / SRE
- Financial services or other highly regulated environments
- Enterprise technology transformation
- Rapid prototyping / innovation engineering
What success looks like
In this role, success isn’t simply measured by the amount of code you write.
You will be successful when you can:
Understand → Build → Deploy → Adopt → Scale
- Turn a business problem into a viable technical solution.
- Get a working solution into the hands of users quickly.
- Build trust with stakeholders through technical expertise and delivery.
- Take solutions into production safely and sustainably.
- Demonstrate measurable business or customer impact.
- Turn successful experiments into reusable engineering capabilities.
Why this role is different
The Forward Deployment Engineer operates where the problem is, not just where the engineering team sits.
You will have the opportunity to combine the depth of a software engineer with the curiosity of a product thinker and the stakeholder skills of a solutions engineer.
You’ll work on problems where the solution isn’t always known upfront - and you’ll be expected to discover, build and deploy the answer.