Head Office
Forward-Deployed Senior Software Engineer (AI products)
Forward-Deployed Senior Software Engineer (AI products)
Epsom & Barbican, London | Hybrid (One office day per week) | Permanent | Full-Time
Competitive salary, depending on experience
37.5 hour per week
We are seeking Forward-deployed Senior Software/AI Product Engineers to identify, design, build and put into production AI-powered tools that solve real business problems. This is a genuinely forward-deployed role: you will be embedded with business stakeholders, with no dedicated Product Owner, Business Analyst or Delivery Manager between you and the business, so you will own discovery, scoping, prioritisation, delivery and stakeholder communication yourself. We are looking for engineers who already have significant experience of working this way, with success measured through adoption, reliability and measurable business value.
Successful candidates will be comfortable owning the full lifecycle, combining strong, product-driven software engineering fundamentals and practical application of AI technologies with cloud and DevOps expertise to deliver value quickly and safely. While AI-assisted development is central to the role, this remains a hands-on software engineering position requiring strong coding, critical-thinking, architectural and operational capabilities.
As a Forward-deployed Senior Software Engineer, you will:
- Own discovery, problem definition, scoping and prioritisation directly with the business, acting as your own product owner and business analyst.
- Build digital products, AI-powered features, agents and automated workflows that solve priority business challenges.
- Work embedded with business stakeholders as their direct engineering partner, validating ideas and quantifying benefits quickly through AI-prototyped products and solutions rather than documentation.
- Use AI-assisted tools (Claude and/or Copilot) to take solutions from discovery and prototype through testing, deployment, monitoring, and iterative development.
- Manage your own delivery, including planning, managing expectations, communicating progress and trade-offs, and reporting outcomes to stakeholders at all levels.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation of cloud-hosted solutions.
- Productionise successful prototypes into secure, maintainable internal applications.
- Champion effective use of AI to increase engineering productivity and accelerate delivery.
As a Forward-deployed Senior Software Engineer, you’ll bring experience in:
- Working in a forward-deployed or embedded engineering model, for example through a digital agency or consultancy, a start-up or scale-up, or a small product team, where you worked directly with the customer or business to uncover needs and deliver solutions.
- Translating loosely defined business challenges and/or requirements into working digital products, collaborating directly with stakeholders to validate ideas through rapid iteration.
- Strong stakeholder collaboration and management skills, including the confidence to challenge, negotiate priorities and manage expectations with senior business stakeholders, plus product judgement and a bias for practical delivery.
- AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude) to accelerate digital product delivery, rapidly producing prototypes, proof-of-concepts and production-ready solutions whilst maintaining appropriate levels of quality, security and maintainability.
- Building AI functionality into a product or application, for example by integrating LLM-based features using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI or similar platforms, with exposure to techniques and frameworks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Model Context Protocol (MCP) vector databases and embeddings, semantic search and agentic workflows.
- Full-stack engineering, building web applications, dashboards, APIs and internal tools using established languages (JavaScript/Java/Python) and frameworks (e.g. React), integrating data from internal and third-party platforms, with a strong grounding in software architecture, security, performance, scalability and resilience.
- Exposure to relational and non-relational database technologies, Data Engineering, Machine Learning and LLM transformer architectures.
- Deploying, operating and supporting applications in cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure, implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment processes.
Desirable skills and experience:
- Evaluating and introducing emerging AI technologies to improve engineering productivity and business outcomes.
- Developing solutions on Microsoft Azure including App Services, Functions, Storage and managed database services, Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Search
- Building and operating production services with appropriate monitoring, alerting, logging and observability tooling (e.g. New Relic), using platforms such as.
- Event-driven architectures, messaging platforms and system integrations.
- Experience in healthcare, fitness, retail, digital or other customer-facing environments.
We will provide:
- A wide variety of interesting and challenging work that involves most of Nuffield Health’s Digital systems.
- An environment where you will be given responsibility to develop your ideas and solutions. You will be working within a community of engineers where your opinions are valued and contribute to the engineering standards and practices adopted.
- Opportunities to learn and develop your career through self-learning, mentoring and/or training courses.
- An environment that allows you to perform at your best work, working collaboratively with like-minded colleagues who are focussed on improving the health of our nation and making a real difference to peoples’ everyday lives
Helping you feel good.
We want you to love coming to work, feeling healthy, happy and valued. That’s why we’ve developed a benefits package with you in mind. Here, you can choose from a range of fitness, lifestyle, health and fitness wellbeing rewards, such as free gym membership, health assessments, retail discounts and pension options.
At Nuffield Health, we take care of what’s important to you.
If you like what you see, why not start your application now? We consider applications as we receive them and reserve the right to close adverts early (for example, where we have received an unprecedented high volume of applications). So, it’s a good idea to apply right away to ensure you’re considered for this role.
Apply today… It starts with you.
#CentralSupport
Rewards & Benefits
Helping you be and feel your best.
Annual Leave
25 days + Bank Holidays, increasing to 27 days after 5 years and to 30 days after 10 years of service.
Nuffield Health Healthcare Plan
Membership is free for employees and you can add partner and dependants at your own cost.
*eligibility criteria applies.
Financial Wellbeing
A range of employee benefits through a Financial Wellbeing provider – including affordable loans repaid through salary, access to your pay when you need it, simple savings, a government Help to Save scheme and money insights.
Cycle to Work Scheme
Save money, get fit and reduce your carbon footprint by taking advantage of this tax-efficient scheme to get a new bike.
Gym Membership
Free membership to any Nuffield Health gym, plus discounted memberships for family members.
Online GP
Discounted access to secure video and telephone GP consultations and a suite of healthcare management tools, provided by digital healthcare company Doctor Care Anywhere.
THE NUFFIELD HEALTH ACADEMY
Leading at every level
We have various Leadership & Talent programmes aimed at developing our future leaders, from discovering leadership through to established and senior leadership programmes. Wherever you are in your career, we’ll provide the support if you have the drive and ambition to become one of our leaders.
THE NUFFIELD HEALTH ACADEMY
Apprenticeships
We’re committed to nurturing the talent of the future. That’s why we support people on Apprenticeships in all areas of our organisation, regardless of age or skill level. With 50+ available programmes, you’ll start your career with us as part of a close-knit, welcoming team.
The Nuffield Health Academy
Managing futures
To complement our Leadership & Talent programmes, we also have a number of management modules. Our online Nuffield Health Academy provides you with the skills to be a successful manager with Nuffield Health, through modules including HR, influencing and recruitment.
Relevant Stories
Sharing memorable experiences.
Having my efforts recognised
Meet Taylor Yost, Contact Centre Team Leader at our Epsom Support Centre.
More than a company
Meet Jodie Howes, Multi-Site General Manager at Croydon Central & Croydon Purley Way Fitness & Wellbeing Centres. Jodie joined us 13 years ago and shares her highlights and career progression.
Achieving aspirations
Meet Martin McGrath, Multi-Site Customer Experience Manager for Wandsworth & Wandsworth Southside Fitness & Wellbeing Centre. Martin joined us in 2011 and shares his story with us so far.
Making a difference
Meet Rebecca Killington, Multi-Site Customer Experience Manager at Romford and Chigwell Fitness & Wellbeing Centres.
Working together
Meet Cathy Bodie. Originally from the US, Cathy became a registered nurse in 1984 and now holds the role of Health & Safety and Facilities Coordinator at our Guildford Hospital. Follow her journey with us.
Pursuing a career in HR
Meet Jack Thomson, Senior People Administrator at our Epsom Head Office. Jack tells about his career progression since joining us 16 months ago.
Learning something new every day
Meet Neethu Sukumaran, People Services Administrator at our Epsom Head Office. Neethu shares the highlights of her journey from joining as a candidate coordinator in 2021 to present.
Thinking outside the box
Meet Philly Croucher, People Service Team Leader at our Epsom Support Centre. Philly shares her journey with us so far.
A great opportunity
Meet Chloe Weir, People Services Administrator at our Epsom Support Centre. Chloe joined us 2 years ago in the remote services team, responding to queries, then moved over to the People Services team where she’ll be progressing to a senior role next month! Follow her journey with us so far.
Pride 2024: Hope's Story
To kick off our Pride Month celebrations, we spoke to Hope Reeves (she/her), Resource Planning Analyst. Hope shares what pride month means to her, the importance of showing support and bringing her whole self to work.
A Day in the life of a Patient Service Administrator
Meet Eilish Mccreadie, Patient Service Administrator at Nuffield Health Glasgow Hospital. We asked Ellish what a typical day looks like, and what the favourite parts of her role are.
International Women's Day 2024
In our series of International Women's Day stories, we spoke to Nicole Swaby, Head of Learning Excellence. spoke to Jodie Howes – Multi-site General Manager, Olivia Tyler – National Fitness Assurance Lead and Nicole Swaby Head of Learning Excellence in NH’s Learning Foundation.
Hints & Tips
Help with your application.
Once you’ve found the right role for you, you can apply online. All you need to do at this stage is submit your CV, a covering email, and a few personal details.
Our recruitment team screens all of the applications we receive. So, if they see that you’ve got the right sort of skills and experience needed for the role, your details will be passed on to the relevant hiring manager. Then, if you fit all the criteria at this stage, you’ll be invited to take part in a video, telephone or face-to-face interview.
CV
Think about the skills and qualities asked for in the job description and show how you’ve applied those same skills and qualities in other roles. Focus on the things that will make us want to see more of you.
Covering email
Your CV will contain details about why you’d be a good fit for the role, but it’s well worth adding a short, snappy paragraph pulling out the two or three most compelling reasons as to why you’d be perfect for the job in your covering email..
Video interview
The video interview lasts 15-20 minutes if you get to this stage. On the day, look the part, be aware of your surroundings and practice your answers to feel prepared. Most of all, relax and be yourself.
DBS Checks
Some of our roles require a DBS check and they are processed through the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) as part of the recruitment process. These checks are to assist employers in making safer recruitment decisions. However, a check is just one part of robust recruitment practice.
Documents
You could be asked to provide proof of vaccinations as part of our Occupational Health pre-employment screening. We know it can be time consuming to get this information if you don’t already have it to hand, so we encourage you to start preparing this information to avoid any delays to the onboarding process.
Your current studies
If you are currently undertaking any strudies, education or apprenticeships, its worth noting there are some training provider we're not partnered with, and therefore potentially unable to support your continued learning. Ensure you share this at interview and for queries contact psc@nuffieldhealth.com
Feedback on applications
Due to the volume of applications we receive we are unable to provide individual feedback from an inital application.