Forward Deployed Engineer

Why we're hiring:

WPP’s Data & Technology Solutions is the WPP’s unified global data products and technology team. We work with our agencies and clients to build data-driven solutions and technology products to power marketing transformation. 

WPP Open is our AI platform for marketing, it connects marketing professionals, data, tools and AI in a single place. WPP Open is the simplest, safest and fastest way to realize the benefits of scaled AI – delivering better-informed creative ideas faster, at scale and at lower cost.

We’re endlessly curious and our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are over 2,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world.

What you'll be doing:

• Build and ship working systems fast - agentic workflows, data pipelines, interfaces and integrations. All centered on answering a commercial question, not a technical one.
• Work directly with external partners, clients, internal operational and commercial teams to translate ambiguous problems into deliverable technical outcomes.
• Build at production-lite quality: moving quickly while incorporating observability, validation, sensible testing and graceful failure rather than creating either disposable prototypes or prematurely over-engineered systems.
• Build the business case alongside the build: what it's worth, who pays for it, what it costs to scale.

Who you'll be working with:

Forward Deployed Engineers are hands-on product engineers who work close to clients, publishers and the market. You will combine technical depth with commercial understanding and consultancy-style problem solving: helping to define a problem, building the solution, testing it in a real setting and translating what works into reusable technical capability.

This is neither isolated prototyping nor slide-led consulting. You will be accountable from discovery through implementation, field validation and handover.

What you'll need:

• 5+ years in software engineering, data science or a related field, with a track record of getting things into real use.
• Strong Python and hands-on cloud experience
• Demonstrable experience building agentic/LLM systems - tool and structured calling orchestration, evaluation, and a realistic view of what breaks when you try to get production value out of them.
• Consultancy-style experience gained through consulting, professional services, solutions engineering, forward deployment or an internal business-transformation function.
• Strong product and commercial judgement, with the ability to communicate technical choices and business implications to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, learning unfamiliar domains quickly and balancing speed with operational credibility.
• Willingness to travel internationally several times a year and develop a strong working knowledge of media and advertising technology.

• Exposure to ad tech or media: ad servers, SSPs/DSPs, programmatic, or order management systems
• Front-end or dashboarding skills for building demonstrable interfaces

Who you are: