Forward Deployed Applications - Senior Software Engineer

About us PhysicsX is a deep-tech company with roots in numerical physics and Formula One, dedicated to accelerating hardware innovation at the speed of software. We are building an AI-driven simulation software stack for engineering and manufacturing across advanced industries. By enabling high-fidelity, multi-physics simulation through AI inference across the entire engineering lifecycle, PhysicsX unlocks new levels of optimization and automation in design, manufacturing, and operations — empowering engineers to push the boundaries of possibility. Our customers include leading innovators in Aerospace & Defense, Materials, Energy, Semiconductors, and Automotive. The Role PhysicsX is building a new category of engineering software — one where physics AI models don't just augment existing workflows, but fundamentally redefine what's possible in design and operations. Our Product team is expanding a portfolio of Engineering Applications that bring this capability directly to the engineers, scientists, and operators who need it most. If you're excited by the challenge of turning cutting-edge AI and simulation research into tools that change how the world's most complex engineering problems get solved, this is the team to do it with. You'll join the Forward Deployed Applications team, a group that sits at the intersection of product development and customer delivery. Your primary mission is to work closely with customers on real engineering problems — and to turn what you learn into generalised, reusable product capabilities that raise the ceiling for every PhysicsX user. This isn't a traditional customer-facing role or a pure product role: it's the feedback loop that keeps our product grounded in genuine engineering value. You'll work alongside simulation engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and backend developers, with significant autonomy in how you approach problems, and a direct line of influence over the direction of our growing application suite. What you will do You'll spend meaningful time in conversations — with users unpacking real engineering workflows, with Delivery teams translating those needs into concrete requirements, and with the Product team debating which patterns are worth generalising. Expect to be a connector as much as a builder, and to develop a strong instinct for which customer insights have product-wide implications. You'll be expected to bring both rigour and initiative: writing clean, well-considered code, contributing to architecture decisions, and pushing back constructively when a bespoke solution risks diverging from the product vision. This team operates with a high degree of autonomy, and the expectation is that you use it thoughtfully. On any given day you might be designing a 3D visualisation that makes a fluid dynamics simulation instantly legible to a non-specialist, building a React interface that surfaces AI model outputs in a live operational context, or refactoring a one-off delivery prototype into something the whole platform can build on. The problems are genuinely novel, and the solutions you build here will define what engineering software looks like next. Serve as an effective development lead and mentor across multiple levels of engineering seniority, drive adoption of best practices, and facilitate complex technical discussions and decisions with clarity and decisiveness. Build consensus around technical decisions, present solutions effectively to leadership, actively contribute to Technical Decision Records and Technology Radar reviews, and commit fully to group decisions even when they differ from your own recommendations. Maintain broad technical knowledge while deepening your specialisation, adapt quickly to new teams, identify emerging technologies and trends, and exemplify accountability by balancing competing priorities and expressing them as well-defined trade-offs. Drive requirements definition for large features, allocate work to junior engineers, present detailed technical decision records with trade-off analyses, and contribute to your team's development, testing, and security standards through automation and compliance validation. Design multi-service systems that account for operational cost, performance, and reliability requirements, implement zero-downtime deployment strategies, define SLAs and quality-of-service metrics, and build proactive monitoring and alerting that scales effectively. What you bring to the table Publish quality-of-service metrics and reliability guarantees, and effectively leverage caching and memoisation strategies to optimise service performance in collaboration with frontend engineers. Develop automated testing strategies to ensure compliance with established standards for API schemas, messaging, and data segregation and access control at the service level. Manage observability metric cardinality to optimise cost and performance, and develop schema drift mitigation strategies that min