Forward Deployed Applications - 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. Contribute to a positive team culture through active participation, clear communication of progress and blockers, constructive code reviews, mentoring of junior engineers, and effective cross-functional collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Demonstrate a strong commitment to continuous development by seeking feedback, staying current with technology trends, sharing knowledge through guilds and documentation, and building expertise across multiple technical areas. Take initiative in breaking down complex problems, evaluating trade-offs, documenting technical decisions, and strategically addressing technical debt while balancing short-term delivery with long-term vision and business context. Write clean, maintainable code following established standards, implement comprehensive testing strategies across the test pyramid, apply secure coding practices and stay current with security threats, and build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes with confidence. Gather requirements and collaborate with stakeholders to define scope, design systems and interfaces that balance functional and non-functional requirements, document technical decisions clearly, and identify and resolve performance bottlenecks through profiling and optimisation. Travel to customer sites in North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, for an average of 3-4 weeks per quarter , where you'll collaborate closely with customers to build solutions on-site What you bring to the table Effectively leverage HTTP frameworks and concurrency primitives, contribute to service interface design using patterns such as Protobuf and OpenAPI, develop composable client libraries with code-generation tooling, and ensure service availability through throttling, rate-limiting, and standard resilience tech