Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

About Alpha FMC Alpha Financial Markets Consulting (Alpha) is a leading global consultancy to the financial services industry. Founded in 2003, we have worked for over 20 years to bring together specialist, sector-focused strategy, management consulting and technology expertise to support the entire client transformation lifecycle. Having partnered with more than 1,200 clients worldwide across the asset and wealth management, alternatives and insurance industries, Alpha is truly a trusted advisor for complex change programs. We now have over 1,180 consultants working with clients across North America, the UK, Europe, Middle East and APAC. In 2024, in recognition of our successful track record and strong growth prospects, Alpha was acquired by Bridgepoint, one of the world's leading quoted private asset growth investors. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. We are delighted that many of our team have built long and fulfilling careers with us, many staying over a decade. We believe this is because Alpha offers a genuinely rewarding place to work: a meritocratic environment where your career can flourish, and a welcoming culture where you can be yourself, connect with others and thrive. As we look to the future, we're excited to be looking for new Alpha colleagues - individuals who are collaborative, innovative and ambitious. We hope you will join us and help shape the next chapter of our growth journey. Why join Alpha? Established yet entrepreneurial - with over 20 years of success and a proven record on the London Stock Exchange, Alpha offers the stability of an established consultancy with the energy of a fast-growth business. Backed by Bridgepoint - as part of one of the world's leading growth investors, Alpha benefits from strategic investment that fuels innovation, expansion and new offerings - creating even more opportunity for our people. Exposure to senior leadership - whether you are in an internal or a client facing role, you will have the opportunity to work with and learn from the best of the best - high performers at the top of their game. Learning and growth opportunities - we run tailored training to help you be successful, provide you excellent mentorship, and offer up to 5 days paid training time per year. Perhaps the best training though is the experience on the job - as everyone at Alpha has high responsibility and autonomy, you can develop your skillsets quickly. Performance-driven culture with real impact - advancement at Alpha is based on impact and capability, not tenure or quotas. You'll have autonomy and see the tangible difference your ideas and decisions make. About the role As a Sr. / Lead Forward Deployed Engineer at AlphaFMC, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how leading financial services organizations adopt and scale AI. You will work on high-visibility initiatives inside wealth management firms, banks, and insurance companies, where the stakes are high and the standards for performance, safety, and governance are non-negotiable. Your experience in data science, LLMs, and agentic AI will directly influence how our clients operate and compete. You will have real ownership across the full solution lifecycle, with visibility into both technical delivery and business outcomes, and meaningful input into the AI strategies we bring to market. What you'll do Own the full lifecycle of AI/ML projects, including problem framing, data acquisition, feature engineering, model and LLM selection and fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines for ingestion, preprocessing, and feature engineering, supporting both structured and unstructured enterprise data. Implement RAG pipelines using vector databases and embedding strategies to ground LLMs in proprietary enterprise data; fine-tune, prompt-engineer, and evaluate LLMs for domain-specific tasks; design and orchestrate agentic workflows including tool-using agents, multi-step planners, guardrails, and alignment mechanisms. Establish robust evaluation frameworks covering hallucination checks, calibration, bias and fairness, and adversarial testing; build logging, telemetry, safeguards, governance artifacts, and documentation for model risk management. Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of AI models from experimentation and prototyping to scalable deployment in production environments using MLOps best practices, CI/CD, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). Optimize inference latency, throughput, and cost; establish monitoring and observability to ensure performance, safety, and reliability in mission-critical environments. Work closely with AI engineers, software engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders to translate complex business problems into AI-native solutions with measurable impact. Qualifications A bachelors' degree in a related field and at least 5 years of experience designing and deploying production-grade AI/ML solutions, including at least one production LLM agent or agentic workflow At least 5 years' experience working in Python and SQL, with hands-on experience in AI/ML frameworks such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, or PyTorch Experience working in a consultative / client-facing position Proven experience with cloud-native development and data warehousing solutions (Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, AWS S3, or equivalent) Strong knowledge of LLMs, transformers, NLP, agentic modeling, and reinforcement learning concepts Experience with open and commercial LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain Agents, DSPy, or equivalent) Experience building data ETL/ELT pipelines and deploying models using Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, and monitoring/observability tools Familiarity with model risk management and trustworthy AI practices, especially in regulated industries Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills; comfortable working across technical teams and business stakeholders How you know if you would be successful in this role? You demonstrate tenured experience across data science, LLMs, and agentic AI. You can move fluidly between model experimentation and production engineering, and you understand the tradeoffs between approaches. You know how to establish and enforce evaluation frameworks to ensure production-ready deployment of AI/ML solutions, with particular sensitivity to the governance requirements of financial services and/or Insurance industries. You work effectively with onshore and offshore engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders. You can explain a RAG pipeline to a senior engineer and a hallucination risk to a compliance officer, adjusting your communication without dumbing things down. You can employ modern AI/ML and GenAI design patterns to solve complex business problems and integrate advanced AI into application architectures with measurable impact. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, stay current with a rapidly evolving AI landscape, and know when to adopt new tools and when to resist the hype. Compensation and Perks: As part of the Alpha team, you will be rewarded with the following: Competitive salary with annual profit-sharing opportunity 401k matching 25 days of annual paid time off (accrued) Supplemented medical, dental and vision coverage Reimbursement for commuting, mobile phone, and home internet expenses North America team-wide training and retreats Sponsorship towards professional certifications / training supported with 5 days of paid training time There are a wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to - skill sets, experience and training, and licensure and certifications.A reasonable estimate of the base salary is $150,000 to $210,000, subject to change based on salary benchmarking. In addition to this salary, employees would be eligible for both variable and non-variable benefits. Our Commitment to Inclusion At Alpha, diversity, equity and inclusion are critical to our success. Our priorities show a focus on fostering an inclusive, equitable workplace where individuals are treated fairly regardless of gender or background. We welcome applications from disabled people and are committed to making our recruitment process and workplace accessible and inclusive for everyone.