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You’ll own end‑to‑end cloud infrastructure consulting and deployment of Thought Machine Vault, from designing high‑availability environments to configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting client or SaaS cloud setups.
The role requires solid hands‑on experience with Linux/Unix, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes (and optionally Istio), automation tools like Terraform, and AWS or GCP, plus the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
As the primary technical interface with clients, you enable banks to replace legacy systems with modern, cloud‑native banking technology, directly impacting Thought Machine’s mission and product success.
Ideal for engineers who thrive in client‑facing, autonomous environments, enjoy occasional travel, and have a strong infrastructure background combined with strong communication skills.
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Platforms & tools
Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.
We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.
We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.
The Forward Deployed Engineer is Thought Machine's primary technical interface with the client as an extension to the product. FDEs embed directly with the client’s engineering teams to design, build, and deliver production-ready implementations of Vault and associated products.
You will be responsible for enabling and supporting our clients to deliver a best in class cloud native implementation of Thought Machine Vault products on client or Thought Machine hosted infrastructure, from presales to production at scale. You will be expected to work on Vault deployments end-to-end, from engineering at the business logic to supporting clients in their cloud infrastructure preparation, deployment, optimisation and troubleshooting.
For this role, we are looking for candidates with tangible infrastructure experience to work with clients on their infrastructure deployments and to act as an extension of our internal SRE teams.
FDEs operate across the full project lifecycle ensuring requirements are implemented, tested and work to improve the product based on client feedback. You will be expected to travel to client sites (up to 25% of your time), work autonomously in complex environments, and act as the connective tissue between Thought Machine's product engineering and the client's delivery teams.
We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.
