Principal Forward-Deployed Engineer

We're looking for a Tech Principal to lead technical strategy and execution on our most ambitious product work: lighthouse projects inside Thoughtworks' global Customer Experience, Product and Design team.

Here's the shape of it. A client arrives with a big idea and not much time. Within a few days, you've helped them turn it into a concept everyone agrees on. Within a few weeks, there's something real that customers can actually use and react to. Within a quarter, it's live. Then you do it again, somewhere else in the world, with a different team, and you leave both of them better at it than they were before.

If you have built a career integrating strategy, architecture, AI engineering, and executive collaboration, this role offers an ideal platform to leverage those skills.

The approach you'd be leading: We call it 3/3/33 days: Product concept. Everyone aligned on scope, objectives and how we'll measure success.
3 weeks: Working prototype. Desirability, viability and feasibility tested with real users.
3 months: MLP launch. A production-grade minimum lovable product, ready to keep evolving.

Think of it as a reference tempo rather than a fixed schedule. The sequence is what we believe in: align quickly, get real evidence early, put something usable in front of customers while the idea is still current. A regulated platform with a heavy integration surface won't run like a greenfield mobile app, and reading the difference is part of the job.

AI runs through all of it, and not as a feature we add at the end. We use AI across the whole lifecycle, from specification and design through build, test and operations, and you'd be one of the people defining what good looks like there.

Who you'd work with

We work in tight forward-deployed pods: one Product Strategist, one Experience Designer, and two Forward-Deployed Engineers. You're one of the FDEs — the lead engineer on the pod — guiding architecture, delivery cadence, and technical commercial choices, while collaborating with the strategist and designer as equal partners rather than a downstream requirements queue. Some of the best moments in this job happen when team members explore a challenge from complementary perspectives and unlock innovative solutions.

On larger programmes you'll lead across multiple pods, each running its own 3/3/3 rhythm — sometimes a mix of Product Innovation, Modernization/Engineering and Data & AI pod types depending on the engagement shape. You'd report to Ahmet Sakar, Director of Technology for CXPD, and operate as part of a small Tech Principal cadre collaborating directly as peers.

Lighthouse projects come in all sizes. Sometimes it's one pod and a single product bet. Sometimes it's a multi-year programme with several streams running at once, real platform and modernization work underneath, and a steering committee to keep alongside. Either way, the work is visible, and when it lands it becomes the case study, the reference architecture and the talk you get invited to give.