Forward Deployed Engineer

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 the same: use AI to understand the physical world, make better decisions and improve outcomes that matter.

We believe the next major frontier of AI is giving machines an understanding of the physical world.

Our platform—Symmetri—combines an understanding of an operator's assets with a physics-informed model of the environment to predict states and consequences and ultimately help operators of critical infrastructure decide what to do.

Our team has spent years earning access and delivering inside these operations. 

Our ambition is to run the infrastructure that 8 billion people depend on and one day become the intelligence layer for the physical world.

Our mission is to harness AI to solve humanity’s most pressing challenges.

Meet the team

Want to know what working here is really like? Meet the Sand team on YouTube and hear directly from the scientists, engineers and leaders behind our work. Click the names below to learn more on some key team members at Sand.

Dr. Mike Flaxman Chief Science Officer	Nomcebo Ngwamba Product Engineering Lead	Ross McIntosh VP of R&D	Lizette Loubser Technical Lead

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineers are the problem solvers and product builders at Sand’s customer frontline. You will help determine what we build by working directly with the people who need it.

Embedded in the customer’s environment, you will discover high-value problems, test ideas and take solutions from prototype through production and adoption. You will use and extend Sand’s existing products, building new features and tools where customer needs reveal gaps.

Your responsibility extends beyond an individual deployment. Working with fellow FDEs, you will identify recurring customer needs and the capabilities that repeatedly prove useful. You will bring that evidence directly into product decisions, working with Product and Platform Engineering to define and prioritise what becomes part of Sand’s shared platform.

This role combines deep technical execution, product discovery, customer partnership and commercial awareness. You will be trusted to form a point of view, challenge assumptions and remain accountable for results. Your work will shape both the outcome for the customer in front of you and the capabilities available to the next team.

The impact you’ll have

Your success will be measured through the customer outcomes you deliver and the product capabilities you help create.

• Customer outcomes: People adopt the solution and it delivers measurable operational, financial or societal value.
• Product direction: Evidence from your work with customers informs what Sand builds and prioritises.
• Reusable capabilities: Features, tools and workflows proven in the field become capabilities that other teams can use.
• Deployment efficiency: Shared capabilities reduce repeated work and help future deployments deliver value faster.

What you’ll do

Discover the problems worth solving

• Work alongside customers to understand their workflows, decisions, operational constraints and highest-value problems.
• Use product judgment to distinguish the underlying problem from the initial feature request.
• Test assumptions through rapid analysis and prototyping, establishing clear success measures and demonstrating value within weeks rather than months.
• Identify needs that recur across customers and could support a broader product capability.

Shape Sand’s product roadmap

• Bring evidence from customer deployments directly into decisions about what Sand builds next.
• Identify which features, tools and workflows should become reusable capabilities, distinguishing shared needs from requirements specific to one customer.
• Work with fellow FDEs as well as Product and Platform Engineering to define and prioritise those capabilities.
• Validate product improvements in the field and use the results to inform the next iteration.
• Help each deployment reduce the time and effort required to deliver value in the next.

Build, deploy and own the outcome

• Use and extend Sand’s existing products, building new features and prototypes where customer needs reveal gaps.
• Take promising ideas through testing, production deployment and iteration with users.
• Build the models, pipelines, integrations, optimisers, AI agents and applications needed to solve the problem.
• Work through imperfect data, data-access restrictions, integration requirements and workflow constraints.
• Balance speed with security, reliability, maintainability and responsible use, remaining accountable for the customer outcome.

Drive adoption and champion the product

• Help customers understand what Sand’s products make possible and apply them to their operations.
• Work directly with users to discover what works, what does not and what needs to change.
• Translate technical concepts into clear decisions and practical actions for operators, engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Demonstrate measurable value, build trust and help new capabilities become part of daily work.
• Train customer teams and transfer knowledge so solutions continue creating value after deployment.

Who you are

You are likely to thrive in this role if you:

• Have 3–5+ years of experience as a Data Scientist, Data Engineer, ML Engineer, Software Engineer or in a similarly technical role.
• Have built solutions using complex, imperfect, real-world datasets.
• Can move confidently between understanding a problem, writing code, testing with users and deploying a working solution.
• Have experience working directly with customers, operators or business stakeholders.
• Communicate clearly with both highly technical and non-technical audiences.
• Are comfortable making progress without a perfect brief or established playbook.
• Take ownership of outcomes and remain resourceful when you encounter constraints.
• 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.