Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer About HSO HSO is a global Business Transformation Partner with deep industry expertise and a long standing strategic relationship with Microsoft. We help organisations unlock the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure, Data and AI technologies to modernise operations, accelerate innovation and deliver meaningful business outcomes. In 2026, HSO achieved Microsoft Frontier Partner status, recognising our advanced capabilities across Microsoft Cloud and AI and our ability to help customers move beyond AI experimentation into secure, governed, enterprise scale production. With operations across Europe, North America and Asia, we combine industry knowledge, technical excellence and a practical, people first approach to transformation. As we continue to expand our AI capabilities, we’re building a new generation of customer facing engineering talent to help organisations turn the potential of AI and agentic technologies into real, measurable value.

About the Role

HSO is building a new generation of customer facing engineers who will help our customers create the operating model of the future using the latest AI, data and cloud capabilities. Forward Deployed Engineers combine consulting judgement, production software engineering, data platform expertise, AI delivery capability and business transformation skills. You will embed with strategic customers, understand their most important business challenges and rapidly turn those challenges into working, production ready AI applications, agentic workflows, automation solutions and data driven platforms. This is a hands on, outcome led role embedded within customer environments. You’ll move quickly from discovery to working software and take accountability for delivering measurable business outcomes. You’ll work across business processes, data platforms, integrations, AI, cloud and security, designing solutions that make effective use of Microsoft technologies while integrating with the customer’s wider technology estate. A strong understanding of modern enterprise data platforms is fundamental to the role. You will need to understand how data is structured, governed, integrated, transformed and made available to AI and application workloads, and how data platform decisions affect the quality, scalability and reliability of the solutions you build. Forward Deployed Engineers work closely with Deployment Strategists. The Deployment Strategist focuses on identifying where AI can create the greatest customer value and defining the desired outcome. The FDE takes ownership of how that outcome is delivered technically. From discovery through to go live, both roles work side by side. The FDE owns the technical solution and delivery, while the Deployment Strategist ensures the solution remains aligned to the business problem and measurable value.

The role

does not end at first deployment. You’ll stay close to solutions through hardening, adoption and handover before moving on to the next value opportunity. You’ll also turn what you learn into reusable HSO assets, reference architectures and delivery patterns that help future engagements move faster. What You’ll Do Own Customer Outcomes • Embed rapidly within customer teams and develop a strong understanding of their priorities, operating processes, systems, data and constraints. • Translate ambiguous business problems and defined customer outcomes into clear technical delivery plans. • Act as the technical lead throughout an engagement, guiding customer sponsors, business users, technical teams and HSO colleagues towards successful delivery. • Build trusted relationships with senior operational and technical stakeholders, including CTO and CIO level leaders. • Take ownership for delivering solutions that create measurable customer value rather than simply completing technical tasks. Lead Discovery and Solution Design • Lead technical discovery workshops to understand customer challenges and identify high value AI, data and automation opportunities. • Assess business processes, data readiness, data architecture, integration points, security requirements, technical risks and operational constraints. • Understand the customer’s existing data platform landscape and identify how data needs to be accessed, transformed, governed or modernised to support the required solution. • Apply a problem first approach to identify the smallest valuable solution that can be built and proven quickly. • Design end to end solution architectures that balance speed, scalability, maintainability, security and responsible AI. • Turn discovery into a pragmatic roadmap from prototype through to production. Build and Ship Production Solutions • Design, build, integrate, test and deploy enterprise grade solutions using modern cloud, data and AI technologies. • Develop AI powered applications, copilots, agents, automations, integrations and workflow solutions. • Build solutions that make effective use of modern enterprise data platforms and ensure AI applications are supported by reliable, governed and accessible data. • Integrate solutions with platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Services, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and customer owned systems, APIs and data platforms. • Apply modern engineering practices including source control, CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code, observability and secure development. • Work iteratively. Deliver value quickly, learn from real world usage and progressively harden solutions for enterprise production. Engineer AI and Agentic Solutions • Design and implement robust agentic workflows, human in the loop processes and, where appropriate, multi agent architectures. • Apply modern techniques across retrieval, grounding, orchestration, tool integration, context engineering and evaluation. • Build evaluation frameworks and guardrails to test AI behaviour, reliability and quality before and after deployment. • Implement appr