Forward Deployed Engineer, Thought Machine
Infrastructure
More information about location
3-5 days a week in office
Cloud native banking platform
Posted today
Cloud native banking platform
501-1000 employees
Posted today
More information about location
3-5 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Thought Machine's mission is to build the new foundations for banking. They want to cure one of the banking industry's primary problems: its reliance on outdated IT infrastructure. Nearly every bank is still stuck on a legacy IT platform.
Role
Who you are
- Ability to explain technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Hands on experience of some or all of the following:
- Linux/Unix administration, e.g. Ubuntu, Debian
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- Kubernetes
- Istio
- Experience with automation/configuration management, e.g. Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible
- Experience with AWS or GCP
- You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description
Desirable
- Experience with at least two and associated certifications for at least one of the following:
- AWS (ideally certified Solutions Architect Professional)
- GCP (ideally certified Professional Cloud Architect)
- Azure (ideally certified Solutions Architect Expert)
- Experience of enterprise secrets management systems, e.g. HashiCorp Vault, AWS secrets manager
- Experience in supporting production systems for high profile, mission critical systems, ideally for a tier 1 financial institution
- Experience with hybrid cloud technologies including OpenShift, Google Anthos, AWS EKS Anywhere, AWS Outposts
- A strong background in Go, Python or Java
- Experience with CockroachDB, AlloyDB, Aurora
- Experience with observability tools, e.g. Prometheus, Grafana
What the job involves
- 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
- Hands on cloud infrastructure consulting both on client site and remote
- Working with customers and external partners to design and prepare suitable cloud infrastructure to ensure Thought Machine Vault products can be tested and run successfully at scale. Includes planning for high availability, disaster recovery, backup, redundancy, capacity and security
- Deploying and configuring Thought Machine Vault products on client, SaaS and internal cloud infrastructure
- Developing deep understanding of and advising clients on optimisation of cloud infrastructure for overarching implementation of Vault, including advising on systems outside of Vault to empower holistic digital transformation in collaboration with Thought Machine Client Architects
- Supporting and troubleshooting client, SaaS and internal cloud infrastructure both remotely and on site, including by promoting and deploying suitable monitoring, logging and alerting tools
- Working closely with internal product and engineering teams to ensure client feedback is incorporated into improvements to the product and platform
- Supporting the Thought Machine Commercial Team and Cloud Provider Partners in answering infrastructure queries and challenges in the presales cycle
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Most traditional banks are stuck on legacy technology. The world's biggest banks today have been around for hundreds of years and their systems reflect this. Their tech systems were built in the mid-20th century and changes/improvements have been layered on top since then.
This infrastructure is creaking in a lot of these institutions, so they need a radical overhaul if they're going to compete with challenger banks like Monzo, N26 and Starling, that have built their banks on modern technology from the ground up.
Thought Machine's customers are primarily in Europe and Asia, and include legacy outfits like Standard Chartered, Lloyds Banking Group, and Sweden’s SEB, but they are also working with challenger banks like Atom Bank. Traditional banks will need to innovate to hold on to their market share, and will need the latest technology to do it, providing a big opportunity for Thought Machine.
The company has raised more than $500m in funding and are now valued at $2.7bn, which is being used to support the transformation of the retail banking market with cloud native technology, solving bank reliance on legacy IT. Thought Machine were named AltFi's B2B Fintech of the Year, placed in the FinTech50, and in the IDC list of top 100 Fintechs.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Oct 2025
$60.3m
LATE VC
May 2022
$160m
SERIES D
Total funding: $620.3m
Company benefits
- Life Insurance- 3 times annual salary
- Competitive Maternity and Paternity leave
- Shared parental leave
- Cycle to work scheme
- Pension (match up to 5%)
- 25 days holiday (excl. bank holidays) + 2 days Charity Leave
Company HQ
Bloomsbury, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Paul Taylor
(CEO)Founder of Phonetic Arts (speech technology in gaming) until it was acquired by Google 4 years later. Then worked for Google as a Technical Lead for 3 years
People progressing
Joined as Back End Software Engineer and became a Tech Lead Manager after 1 year 4 months and is now an Engineering Director.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Thought Machine
Natalie Brock (Chief of Staff - People)
- Diversity is an integral part of life at Thought Machine. We want to create a work environment where employees enjoy showing up to work authentically as their best self.
- We celebrate our differences with culture events and internal community networks such as the women’s group, OUT our LGBTQ+ group and Belong, which celebrates different ethnicities
- In terms of nationality, Thought Machine has 450 staff and over 45 different nationalities across three offices.
- Although we are above the UK’s average of women in fintech, we have got work to do.
- To help us achieve greater parity we have introduced a number of measures and initiatives, including coaching and training.
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