Forward Deployed Engineer — Tradestack 📍 London, SW19 (in-person) | Seed stage | Equity + competitive salary

The model that's changing how AI gets adopted in construction

The biggest problem in construction AI isn't the technology. It's adoption. Most contractors don't know how to prompt, configure, or integrate AI into their existing workflows — so even the best tools go unused.

The answer isn't better onboarding. It's embedding engineers directly with clients.

Sit alongside them, understand their actual problems, and build solutions fitted to how they already work. Fast feedback loop, fast trust, fast value. It's the only deployment model that actually works in an industry where AI literacy is still low and scepticism is high.

What Tradestack does

We give UK trade and construction contractors (£500K–£10M revenue) a workforce of AI operators — digital team members that handle the admin, finance, and compliance work that currently eats into evenings and weekends. We're embedded in the tools they already use: Xero, SimPro, ServiceM8, BigChange, WhatsApp.

The role

You'll sit between our clients and our engineering team. You're not a solutions consultant — you're a builder who works directly with clients to diagnose problems, design the solution, and deploy it.

In practice:

• Embed with contractors to map their workflows end to end and identify where AI operators replace manual work
• Build and configure automations across our integrations (accounting systems, job management platforms, WhatsApp, email)
• Deploy AI agents for invoice processing, bank reconciliation, quote generation, reporting, voice and compliance tracking
• Own the client relationship technically — tune, iterate, and expand usage over time
• Feed what you learn back into product development with our CTO
• Help build the deployment playbooks that will let us scale this function

What makes someone right for this

You need to be the kind of engineer who's comfortable being dropped into a messy business with no clear spec, figuring out what the real problem is, and building something that actually works.

Technical

• AI-native: you've meaningfully replaced your traditional development workflow with AI tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar — and you ship faster because of it. You're not experimenting with these tools; they're how you work
• Strong engineering fundamentals + top tier experience
• Hands-on experience with APIs, workflow automation, and system integrations

Industry

• Real familiarity with how trade and construction businesses operate — the chaos of job scheduling, the paperwork burden, how field teams actually communicate, how money flows on a job
• Experience working with or building software for field service, facilities management, construction, or a related trade industry is a strong advantage and will be weighted heavily
• You understand the difference between how a £1M electrical contractor runs and how a £10M gas engineering contractor runs + and you can adapt to both

Communication

• Excellent verbal communication > you can sit in a client's office, ask the right questions, and earn trust quickly with people who are sceptical of technology
• Excellent written communication > you can turn a messy client conversation into a clear technical brief, a workflow diagram, or a deployment plan
• You're as comfortable talking to a site manager about their job sheets as you are talking to a CTO about API architecture

What you're joining

• A market with real problems and real urgency — UK construction is a £150B+ industry that needs to modernised
• Brownfield digitisation without rip-and-replace — we work with what clients already have
• Direct access to both founders (construction + MBA + engineering backgrounds) with strong influence over product direction
• Early equity with meaningful upside
• You'll define what the FDE function looks like at Tradestack — this isn't a templated role