Forward Deployed Engineer

Full-time | Hybrid (2–3 days/week) | Milan

About Shop Circle

Shop Circle is an AI-native holding company that acquires and scales mission-critical B2B software businesses globally.

Backed by leading institutional investors and with $200m+ raised to date, we serve 200,000+ businesses across diverse verticals.

We focus on high-retention, deeply embedded software, accelerating growth through our centralised AI platform to drive revenue expansion, operational efficiency, and continuous product improvement.

The Role

We're hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to take AI from idea to production inside our portfolio companies. You will embed with operators, product leaders, and founders across the businesses we own, find the highest-leverage AI opportunities, and ship the solutions yourself.

This is not a research role and it is not a pure platform role. You sit at the seam between our central AI team and the operating businesses, with one foot in code and one foot in the business. You move fast, stay close to the problem, and own outcomes end-to-end.

It suits engineers who like context-switching across products, who can translate a messy business problem into a working system in days, and who care more about measurable impact than elegant architecture.

What You'll Do

• Embed directly with portfolio companies to understand their products, customers, and operating metrics.
• Identify the highest-impact AI opportunities and turn them into production-grade solutions.
• Design, build, and deploy AI features end-to-end using LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent-based systems.
• Implement guardrails, evaluations, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop flows for reliability in production.
• Optimise systems for accuracy, latency, and cost, and iterate based on real usage.
• Work alongside founders, operators, and product teams to validate solutions against business outcomes.
• Apply the central AI platform inside each portfolio company, and feed reusable patterns back into it.
• Measure and report impact on revenue, efficiency, and retention for every shipped solution.

What We're Looking For

• 3–6 years of software engineering experience with a track record of building and maintaining production systems at scale.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience building robust backend services and APIs.
• Production experience with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agent-based systems.
• Proven ability to take systems from prototype to production quickly, without losing quality.
• Comfort working directly with non-technical operators and translating ambiguous business problems into shippable technical solutions.
• Strong judgement in balancing speed, quality, and scalability under real constraints.
• Strong academic background in a technology-related field.
• Excellent communication in English, the primary language across the business.

Nice to Have

• Experience with evaluation frameworks and benchmarking for AI systems.
• Familiarity with vector databases such as Pinecone or Chroma.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools for AI in production.
• Frontend experience with JavaScript or TypeScript for full-stack prototyping.
• Prior customer-facing, consulting, or deployment-led engineering experience.
• Exposure to B2B SaaS business metrics and ROI-driven decision-making.

Why Shop Circle

• Ship AI across a diverse portfolio of B2B SaaS products, not just one.
• Build systems with direct, measurable impact on revenue and operating performance.
• High ownership, low bureaucracy, fast execution.
• Tight collaboration with a central AI team shaping company-wide strategy.
• Competitive compensation and a strong growth trajectory as the portfolio scales.

Ready to Build With Us?

If you enjoy solving real business problems with AI, thrive in fast-moving environments, and want to deploy systems that create measurable impact at scale, we’d love to hear from you.