Forward Deployed Engineer

Our Mission

At Ophelos, we believe in a different way to deal with debt. One that puts empathy and understanding front and centre, approaching our customers as individuals — no matter what they’re going through.

For too long, people in debt have borne the brunt of poor industry practices. Intimidating tactics, time-consuming customer service and a one-size-fits-all approach that overlooks the reasons anyone can fall into debt in the first place. Meanwhile, businesses suffer too. Poor customer experience translates to poor customer satisfaction, high churn rates, bad brand reputation and ultimately missed opportunities.

That’s why we’re taking a radically different approach. Pioneering an industry-first AI-native collections platform, we build products that help individuals clear their debts in a way that suits them, whilst providing businesses with an improved customer experience and game-changing insights into their customer base.

Since our launch in 2021, we’ve worked with some of the UK’s leading companies, including Octopus, Scottish Power and Philips — helping millions of people move toward a more stable, debt-free future. In 2023, we were acquired by Intrum, Europe’s biggest credit management service and have begun the next phase in our growth — expansion into 17 European markets over the next two years.

Forward Deployed Engineer

London-based with European travel (UK, France, Portugal and beyond)

About the Role

Ophelos is at a pivotal moment. We've built a market-leading, AI-first debt resolution platform — and now we're deploying it at scale across Intrum's European business. As our Forward Deployed Engineer , you'll lead that effort.

Intrum, our parent company and one of Europe's largest credit management businesses, manages debt on behalf of a wide range of merchant clients — retailers, telcos, financial institutions, and more — across multiple European markets. Your job is to onboard those clients onto the Ophelos platform: understanding their data, their business logic, their customer portfolios, and their contractual and regulatory context, and making sure Ophelos works correctly for each of them.

Every client is different. They come with different data formats and quality standards, different definitions of what a debt case looks like, different regulatory obligations depending on their sector and market, and different expectations of how their customers should be treated. Your job is to absorb all of that, map it clearly, and translate it into a solution that works — at scale, across many clients, across multiple countries.

This role sits at the intersection of solution architecture, technical consulting, and product partnership. You'll spend as much time in discovery conversations and design workshops as you will in configuration files and integration specs. You'll need to be equally credible with a compliance lead in Paris, a data engineer in Lisbon, and a product manager in London.

What You'll Do

Onboard merchant clients onto Ophelos Each client Intrum brings to Ophelos has its own data structures, business rules, and portfolio characteristics. You'll lead the technical onboarding — understanding their data, designing the ingestion and mapping layer, and ensuring Ophelos represents their cases accurately and operates correctly on their behalf.

Navigate localisation and regulatory complexity Operating across European markets means dealing with materially different regulatory frameworks, debt collection norms, and consumer protection requirements — which vary by country, and sometimes by client sector. You'll develop deep fluency in what those differences mean technically, and design the configuration and solution patterns that allow Ophelos to serve each context correctly.

Design solutions, not just integrations You'll translate complex, sometimes ambiguous client requirements into clean solution designs — mapping existing data structures, business logic, and operational processes to Ophelos's platform. This isn't just about getting data from A to B; it's about understanding the business intent behind every field and flow, and making sure nothing gets lost in translation.

Own the data ingestion layer A significant part of this role involves designing and owning how each client's data arrives into Ophelos — in the right shape, with the right validation, from the right sources. You'll work across varying data formats, system conventions, and quality standards, and build patterns that make future onboarding progressively more efficient.

Close the feedback loop You're Ophelos's eyes and ears in the field. When you encounter a recurring client need, a gap in our product, a bug that only surfaces in a specific market context, or a feature that would unlock onboarding for a whole segment of clients — you bring that back clearly and systematically. You'll log issues, articulate feature requests with context and business case, and act as a structured conduit between the real world and Ophelos's product and engineering teams.

Build the onboarding playbook Document what you learn. Build reusable patterns, data mapping frameworks, and localisation guides that make each subsequent client onboarding faster and more predictable than the last.

Use LLM tooling as a force multiplier Like all Ophelos engineers, you'll work in an AI-first way — using Claude Code, Codex, and OpenSpec to accelerate integration work, draft specs, and explore solutions faster than traditional approaches allow.

The Ophelos Platform

You'll need to develop deep familiarity with our stack — not necessarily to build core features, but to understand its capabilities, constraints, and integration surface thoroughly:

Languages: TypeScript, Python, Ruby

Backend frameworks: FastAPI, Ruby on Rails

Data: PostgreSQL (via PlanetScale), Databricks

Workflow orchestration: Temporal

Financial ledger: TigerBeetle

Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes

Observability: Datadog

LLM tooling: Claude Code, OpenSpec, Codex

About You

You're a systems thinker with technical depth and strong commercial instincts. You've probably worked in fintech, financial services, or enterprise SaaS — in a role that required you to get inside a client's world, understand it thoroughly, and design solutions that actually fit.

You might come from a solutions engineering, implementation consulting, or technical architecture background. What matters is that you're equally comfortable shaping a solution design and getting hands-on with the data or configuration to make it real. You're energised by variety — different clients, different markets, different problems — rather than unsettled by it.

You'll likely have:

Experience in a solutions architect, forward-deployed engineer, technical consultant, or implementation lead role — ideally at a fintech, payments, or financial services company

Strong systems thinking: you naturally map business processes, data flows, and client-specific logic into coherent technical designs

Comfort with data — understanding schemas, transformation logic, validation rules, and ingestion pipelines at a practical level

Experience navigating regulatory or compliance requirements that vary across markets, sectors, or client types

The ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, and business context clearly to engineers

A structured approach to discovery: you ask good questions, document rigorously, and turn ambiguity into clarity

Willingness to travel regularly across Europe (primarily UK, France, and Portugal, with further markets to follow)

Bonus points for:

Background in debt management, credit, collections, or payments — understanding the domain accelerates everything

Working knowledge of French

Experience onboarding multiple enterprise clients with divergent data models or business logic onto a shared platform

A track record of feeding structured product feedback from deploym