Take on a codebase. Rebuild it with AI. Move on to the next one.
My client owns a large international portfolio of software businesses. Each one has a real product, real customers and a real engineering team, and plenty have systems ready for their next big rebuild. They’re building a small forward-deployed team of hands-on engineers to lead that work.
The job
Every 3-6 months you join a different business and take on one hard problem, such as re-platforming a system that’s held the company back for years, or building the feature its customers have been waiting for. Half your time you’re building it yourself. The other half you’re bringing that team into AI-first engineering: setting up coding agents and workflows, working out what genuinely helps, and leaving them faster than you found them.
You write the code and you get it into production.
How you’ll work: AI across the whole lifecycle
You’ll cover frontend, backend and infrastructure, using AI at every stage of the software development lifecycle: understanding an unfamiliar codebase, designing the solution, writing the code, testing and reviewing it, and getting it deployed and running.
Work that would normally pass between a frontend developer, a backend developer and a DevOps engineer sits with you, from first look to production. You’ll have your strengths, and AI helps you cover the rest. That’s also the way of working you’ll pass on to each team you join. The aim is speed: shipping far faster than a traditional team could, and showing each business how it’s done.
You’ll love this if…
- You’re an experienced engineer who’s comfortable being the most senior technical person in the room
- You’ve already used AI to make your own delivery faster, through coding agents, MCP or AI in your pipeline, and can point to what got quicker and how
- You like owning a problem end to end, across the whole stack
- You get a buzz from opening an unfamiliar codebase and working it out fast
- You enjoy bringing people with you: you’re curious about how other teams work, patient with sceptics, and you get satisfaction from seeing other engineers level up
- You build trust quickly, can read a room, and are as comfortable talking to a CEO as to a junior developer
- Python, TypeScript, Java, .NET: you’re comfortable picking up whatever the business runs on
Why it’s different
- Real backing: you’ll join an established AI transformation function that’s already running AI programmes across the group, so you’re building on momentum that’s already there
- Zero sales: every business you work with is already part of the group, so your time goes on engineering and people, with no pitching, bidding or chasing contracts
- Get in early: the forward-deployed team is new, so you’ll help shape how it works, which tools it backs and what AI-first engineering looks like in practice
- Constant variety with a stable base: a new industry, product and problem every few months, with one permanent employer behind you
- Industries you’d rarely see from the inside: specialist software that runs real-world sectors, with a new domain to learn on every project
- Competitive salary plus bonus, remote-first anywhere in the UK
If you’re the person on your team who’s already figured out how to build properly with AI, this is where you take that across a whole portfolio.
Please note: applicants must have the right to work in the UK.