Forward Deployed Engineer

We are STX Next, a global IT consulting company specializing in customer-focused software services. Join a group of 500 professionals dedicated to helping customers build outstanding products. Leveraging the latest advancements in the field, and a passion for innovation, we're shaping the future of technology one project at a time.

We are looking for an engineer who would rather sit in a client's office and build the thing than sit in ours and specify it.

STX Next builds software for European companies, and we are changing how we do it. Instead of sending a team and a project manager, we send one engineer who owns the client. You work inside their business, you find out how it actually runs, and you build. Behind you sits an AI pod, a small team of engineers plus our own agent tooling on our AI SDLC, which takes on the bulk of delivery once you have proven what is worth building.

The name is literal. Forward deployed means physically there. Not remote, not from our office, not on a call. You will be at the client's premises around four days a month, and the whole role depends on it.

What this role is not

• You will write production code. If you want to stop being hands-on, this is the wrong move.

• It is not a specialist post. Not only data, not only AI, not only backend. Versatility is the point, because you will not get to choose what the client's problem needs.

• It is not project management. Reporting cadence, documentation and invoicing stay with our PM function.

• It is not a remote job with occasional travel. The onsite time is the job, not an add-on to it.

• It is not new business development. Winning new logos stays with Sales. You grow the client you already have.

• Own one client, end to end. You are the one name the client knows, from the first conversation through discovery, build, production and whatever comes after it. Nobody hands them on to a successor.

• Find the real problem. Discovery is not a workshop. It is watching how the work is really done, listening for the manual workaround nobody has mentioned, and working out whether fixing it would actually move the client's numbers.

• Build the prototype yourself. The way you prove something is worth doing is to build a working version of it and put it in front of the client. Not a deck, not a recommendation. A thing that runs.

• Lead the AI pod behind you. You decide who is on it, you are accountable for what it ships, and you stay close enough to know when it is drifting. As delivery settles, more of it moves to the pod and more of your time goes to the next problem.

• Make the value legible. You will show the client what a change saved them in hours, cost or risk, in numbers their own leadership can act on. Technical elegance is not the argument.

• Unlock the next project. Once the current work is safe, your job is to spot the next problem, prototype the answer and put the case to the client. Our commercial team handles pricing, contracting and paperwork. The idea and the conversation are yours.

• Bring it back to us. What you learn about how this client works, and about how we should estimate and sell this kind of work, comes back into our playbooks and accelerators. The second engagement should be cheaper than the first.

• Strong, broad engineering. You can design, build, deploy and run a real system end to end, across the stack, in an environment that will not look like a clean internal codebase.

• Working command of AI. Real understanding of what current AI tooling can and cannot do, and where an accelerator shortens the path. Not prompt literacy.

• Translation, both directions. You listen to a business problem and come back with a technical option framed as a commercial decision. Cost, risk, payback, and what happens if the client does nothing.

• Communication as a first-class skill. You can hold a room with a CTO and a CFO at the same time and make sense to both. You send the update before anyone asks for it, and bad news comes from you first.

• You behave like an owner. The team is yours, the client is yours, the result is yours. You will have the mandate that goes with that, including the standing to advise a client against work we could have sold.

• Comfort with ambiguity. No finished spec, a moving target, and a client who often cannot yet articulate the problem. If that reads as energising rather than exhausting, good.

• Language. Fluent English, spoken and written. Polish if you will be working with our Polish clients.
  
  

Extra package

• Pay that reflects the ownership. Market salary for a senior engineer of this calibre, plus an uncapped bonus tied to the margin your account delivers and to the new work you unlock. 

• A genuine mandate. Decision authority over your pod, your technical approach and the proposals that go to your client, with the access to project financials that makes that real.