Forward Deployed Engineer, London

Location

London

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

Compensation

Base salary £150K – £300K • Offers Equity • Significant equity

What we do

We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz, and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others. We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more. Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR. If this excites you, come help us build it!

The Role

Forward Deployed Engineer - London

As one of the first Forward Deployed Engineers at Meticulous, you'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our core engineering team at our London headquarters and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive; you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next.

Core Responsibilities

This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what’s needed to make sure Meticulous is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer relationship:

Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them.
Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to work at a new level of scale required by the customer.
Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account.
Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen.
Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling,

and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than last creating leverage that lets team scale.

What We're Looking For

Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years experience.
Highly agentic: You have a bias to action move fast take ownership without being asked get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive.
Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts both engineers executives; you're energized by customer collaboration.
Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel customer sites majority enterprise customers US-based.

This role not for you if…

You want pure IC engineering role no customer contact.
You need structured handoffs clear specs defined process follow.
You expect regular hours no travel - our team customers investors span SF London NYC role requires comfort working across time zones.
You want engineering work insulated from customers problems.

You may look like…

Senior IC top tech company ready leave bureaucracy behind own real customer outcomes end-to-end.
Ex-founder or technical founding engineer wants keep founder-energy plug into company product-market fit clear path scale.
Forward Deployed Engineer OpenAI Scale Anthropic looking earlier-stage version similar work.
Solutions architect or staff engineer wants more deep engineering less PowerPoint.

What You'll Gain

Help build new function

as one first FDEs Meticulous you'll instrumental defining how team operates—from processes & tooling through how scales clear path leadership function grows.

Exceptional growth

you grow through combination people you work experiences exposed:

Our philosophy density talent matters; so keep team small exceptional individuals collaborate world-class engineers previously led 100+ person organizations top companies; expect team beyond any you've worked before within big tech (Google/Meta) otherwise combined focus learning growing together means rapid pace learning each other.

beyond skill growth through engineering collaboration: spend time engineering leaders fastest growing tech companies leading firms globally gain unique exposure across technologies/practices/codebases/architectures/cultures/learnings—what works doesn’t—valuable bird's eye view normally taking years decades moving between companies few startups grow fast join small team exceptional trajectory bringing unique growth network.

Expand your network

oun investor network among most active tech—we'll connect whoever helps do your job better work engineering leaders across many leading tech companies often highest levels given speed desirability among leading enterprises Meticulous offers opportunity building network spanning full technology world .

Solve novel problems

n challenges intersecting browser technology/testing infrastructure/large-scale system design few engineers encounter—to build something changing software development way .

World-class compensation

base salary £150K–£300K plus significant equity exceeding compensation top tech companies/startups .

Perks ♥️ 374 4bb 334 4da

many more ! life meticulous believe autonomous testing enable automation majority software development forefront working companies first realizing future role on-site because speed/depth collaboration needed customer success technical excellence happens best person compensation range £150K - £300K