Forward Deployment Engineer

Main purpose

Trafigura is recruiting a hands-on Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE) to sit at the intersection of product engineering and business outcomes within an assigned business domain. The FDE embeds directly with business stakeholders, leads technical deployments end-to-end, builds bespoke integrations and ensures the engagement layer drives measurable business value. This is not a support role: the FDE owns the full technical lifecycle, from discovery through to production, for domain-specific tools, dashboards, AI-assisted workflows and lightweight apps sitting on top of core enterprise systems.

The role is IT-owned but embedded with the business, working alongside key users and domain leads to take working prototypes through to production: integrating them with the Enterprise Data Platform and core Trafigura systems; deploying agentic AI workflows; and taking radical ownership of live production. The focus is practical delivery in the field.

Key responsibilities

Customer Immersion & Solution Delivery

• Embed directly with assigned business teams on-site to understand their workflows, constraints and business objectives and translate prototypes into production-grade applications on the agreed enterprise stack (React, Python or Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS).
• Own the full technical lifecycle of the “last mile” – from discovery and architecture proposals through hardening, test coverage, performance, UX consistency and readiness for enterprise rollout.
• Conduct deep-dive technical discovery sessions with stakeholders from technical ICs to executives; produce scoping documents, architecture decision records and reusable design-system patterns across engagement-layer applications.
• Translate technical concepts into clear business value; release frequently against a continuous backlog of business requests using ticket- and feedback-driven workflows.

Solution Design & Implementation

• Architect and build production-grade custom integrations, APIs, data pipelines and workflow automations between engagement-layer applications and core Trafigura systems.
• Transform proof-of-concept prototypes into secure, scalable and compliant production systems – building event streams and batch interfaces that move data into governed enterprise flows, starting with read-only pulls and progressing to bidirectional integration.

AI & Agentic Workflows

• Design, deploy and orchestrate agentic AI workflows using frameworks such as LangGraph; implement RAG pipelines, fine-tuned models and vector database integrations within the assigned business domain.
• Operate the end-to-end delivery toolchain (AWS, GitLab, Docker, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code) and AI-assisted development environments (Claude Code and shared skills such as Shipper) so that builders and engineers can ship safely and quickly.
• Use AI tooling to automate diagnostics, pre-analyse domain data, and reduce manual engineering lift across development, test and production environments.

Governance, Security and Controls

• Integrate engagement-layer applications with Azure Entra ID for single sign-on (OIDC / SAML) and SCIM provisioning; implement industry-standard user, group, role and permission models.
• Enforce segregation of duties, access reviews, audit logging and change-management discipline appropriate for applications handling sensitive business data.
• Partner with IT Security, Risk and Compliance to ensure applications meet Trafigura’s security and data-handling standards before production rollout.

Production Ownership & Troubleshooting

• Own deployments end-to-end across engagement-layer applications: triage outages, perform root-cause analysis, apply patches and monitor the live stack.
• Debug real-world edge cases in live environments and resolve performance or schema conflicts under operational pressure; own runbooks, ADRs and operational handover from build to run.
• Take radical ownership of production issues regardless of time or complexity, coordinating with core support teams on cross-system incidents.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Act as the day-to-day technical partner for the assigned business domain – visible, responsive and embedded; build trust across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Partner with peer IT functions, Enterprise Architecture and Platform Engineering to align on standards and roadmap; feed reusable patterns and field insights back to the core platform team.
• Decompose ambiguous, open-ended business problems into actionable deliverables; push back constructively when proposed approaches will not scale or will not meet control requirements.

Required qualifications

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field.
• 6+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least 2 years embedded with users delivering production applications in financial services, commodities or comparable enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated experience taking proof-of-concept prototypes through the full technical lifecycle to secure, production-grade systems; comfort owning the technical work end-to-end.

Technical Knowledge

• Strong proficiency in Python and full-stack engineering: React (or equivalent modern front-end framework) and Node.js back-end, PostgreSQL; additional languages (Go, Java) a plus.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS), Docker and Kubernetes; CI/CD in GitLab (or equivalent); infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform); observability and monitoring stacks.
• Solid understanding of database systems, SQL, data modelling, ETL pipelines, REST/gRPC APIs and microservices architecture; identity and access management with OIDC / SAML and Azure Entra ID.
• Experience with LLMs, RAG systems, prompt engineering and AI evaluation frameworks; familiarity with MLOps, model deployment and AI observability/guardrails; working use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude Code).
• Familiarity with one or more of: trading, ERP or treasury platforms; workflow or document platforms; or enterprise domain data models relevant to the assigned business area.

Leadership & Skills

• Exceptional communication – able to lead a customer meeting with confidence and clarity; ships frequently, measures adoption and iterates on user feedback.
• Strong problem decomposition and customer empathy; comfortable operating at the business / IT boundary with domain users as well as enterprise IT peers.
• Radical ownership – you don’t file a ticket at 2 AM, you fix the problem; pragmatic judgement about what belongs on the engagement layer versus what must be solved in core enterprise systems.
• Clear written and verbal communication; self-directed; able to prioritise independently across multiple stakeholders.

Department overview

The Digital Transformation Team is a joint venture between Trading Technology and the Data Science and Engineering Team.

Reporting Structure

• Reports to the Team Lead, Engagement Layer Delivery within the relevant technology function, part of Business Technology Services (BTS) / IT. Skip-line reporting to the Head of the relevant technology function. Embedded with the assigned business domain.
• The role has regular working relationships with domain leadership and users; and with peer IT functions including Enterprise Architecture and Platform Engineering.

Equal opportunity employer

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and take pride in a diverse workforce! We do not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, marital or veteran status, medical condition or handicap, disability, or any other legally protected status.