Forward Deployed Engineer

The posting, as Sand Tech Holdings Limited wrote it

Forward Deployed Engineer

Go where the hardest problems are. Build what comes next.

Some of the most important advances in AI will come from exceptional engineers working where technology meets the real world. At Sand, Forward Deployed Engineers take on that challenge. You will work at the frontier of what AI can do, alongside the people running essential systems, with the freedom to discover what is possible and the responsibility to make it work.

This is one of Sand’s most demanding and influential engineering roles. You will tackle problems without an established answer, turn emerging technology into products people depend on, and help determine what the company builds next. The discoveries you make with one customer can become capabilities that transform how entire industries operate.

Your work could help protect a city’s water supply, strengthen healthcare for millions of people, improve critical energy infrastructure or give a Formula E team an advantage when seconds matter. You will see your ideas tested against real conditions and witness the difference they make.

We combine an understanding of the operator’s assets with a model of the physical environment around them, so we can predict states, consequences, and help decide what to do.

The scarce resource in physical AI isn't just compute. It’s access. As an FDE, you will be key in enabling that access.Some initial deployments that historically took months can now be stood up in days; St. Louis was deployed in 48 hours.

Our growth strategy is to land with one valuable use case, embed in operations and expand across applications and assets. As an FDE, you will play a key role in delivering the outcomes and building the trust that will enable our growth and impact.

We are looking for engineers with the technical depth to build, the imagination to see what could be better and the determination to make it happen . If you want extraordinary responsibility, exceptional colleagues and the chance to shape the next generation of AI products, this is where you can do your most consequential work.

About Sand

Sand Technologies is a global Physical AI company building intelligent systems for the infrastructure society depends on.

We partner with governments, cities and enterprises to improve how essential systems operate across healthcare, water, energy, telecommunications and infrastructure. Our teams have built AI systems that help manage London’s water supply for 16 million customers, supported telecommunications planning across hundreds of cities (and islands), and developed digital healthcare platforms serving millions of people across Africa.

Our work also takes us into less conventional environments. Through our partnership with Envision Racing, we have applied AI and data science to Formula E race analysis—helping engineers process complex performance data faster and improve decision-making during highly time-constrained race weekends.

Across these projects, the principle is
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ints.

• Want your technical work to create visible, meaningful impact in the physical world.
• Are excited by significant travel and spending time embedded with customers.

Technical experience

We’re looking for strong fundamentals rather than one exact technology stack. Relevant experience may include:

• Strong programming ability, preferably in Python, together with SQL and modern data tooling.
• Preference for front-end product engineering capabilities (including Typescript).
• Data ingestion, transformation and pipeline development.
• APIs, cloud environments and enterprise data architectures.
• Applied machine learning, optimisation, simulation or operations research.
• Modern AI development, including LLM applications, agents, retrieval and evaluation.
• Data visualisation and rapid application or prototyping frameworks.
• Deploying, monitoring and iterating production solutions.

Experience in energy, utilities, healthcare, telecommunications, government or another asset-intensive industry is valuable, but not essential.

How we work

At Sand, we own outcomes, not simply tasks or functions.

We bring together engineers, scientists, product builders and industry experts from across the world to solve problems that rarely fit neatly within one discipline. You may begin a week inside a customer’s operational environment, spend the next few days building and testing a prototype, and finish presenting the results to senior decision-makers or working with our platform team to turn your approach into a reusable capability.

You will have considerable autonomy, but you will not work alone. You’ll be surrounded by deeply capable colleagues who share context freely, challenge one another thoughtfully and step across conventional role boundaries when the problem requires it.

We value people who are curious enough to ask better questions, practical enough to ship, and ambitious enough to believe AI can (and should) make the systems people rely on work better.