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 deployments back into a product organisation

Why This Role

This is a rare opportunity to operate at the centre of a major European expansion — with real complexity, real stakes, and direct influence over how a genuinely impactful product gets adopted across a continent. You'll develop a breadth of domain knowledge, technical context, and stakeholder experience that's hard to find anywhere else.

And you'll be helping Ophelos do what it exists to do: support households and businesses in breaking the cycle of problem debt.

Working Arrangements

Based in London, with regular travel across Europe — primarily UK, France, and Portugal, with other markets to follow as the rollout expands. Ophelos operates on a hybrid model with three days per week in our office near Liverpool Street; during active client onboardings, on-site presence will be required.

Ophelos is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

About Our Team

Ophelos launched in June of 2021, backed by investors such as AlbionVC, Connect Ventures and Fly Ventures. In 2023, we were acquired by Intrum, Europe’s biggest credit management service. Our growing team has team helped build some of the world’s most successful businesses, including the likes of Monzo, Google, Oracle, ASAPP, IBM and more — in addition to pioneering innovative products, sitting at the intersection of enterprise, financial technology, artificial intelligence and academia, working with institutions such as Oxford University, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Hong Kong.

Our Values

Supporting customers and businesses to improve their financial health is a long-term mission. Our company values act as our north star, steering our every move as an organisation and are the backbone of our unique company culture. Our values and culture allow us to stay true to our larger purpose, even as we continue to grow at a rapid pace.

Customers and Clients first – We exist to help real people move through debt and to get clients paid back. This commitment drives how we design products, deliver services, and interact with customers and clients daily.

Dream big – We have ambition and drive to succeed - we’re not just raising the bar, we’re confidently asserting ourselves as the benchmark.

Get it done – We’re decisive and embrace a sense of urgency; we don’t let opportunities get away from us. We’d rather act quickly and take informed risks, iterating and learning as we go.

Win as one - We work as one team, supporting each other and aiming for shared goals. At Ophelos, the team isn’t just individual departments - it’s all of us together. We challenge and support each other because we care about everyone’s growth and success.

Ophelos is committed to creating a diverse work environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace, providing equal employment and advancement opportunities to all team members. We are building an environment where every Ophelos team member can thrive, feel a sense of belonging, and do the best work of their careers. We value diversity and recruit, hire, and promote individuals solely based on talent, qualifications, competence, and merit. We evaluate candidates without regard to race, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or other protected characteristics as required by law and as a matter of our company values.

GDPR Notice

When you apply to a job on this site, the personal data contained in your application will be collected by Ophelos ("Controller"), located at 1 Finsbury Ave, London EC2M 2PF, and can be contacted by emailing [email protected]. Controller's data protection contact is Kofi Barnes, who can be contacted at [email protected].

This notice explains how we process your personal data throughout our recruitment process, including at the interview stage described below. Applying for a role with Ophelos is subject to the practices described in this notice — it is not a separate agreement you sign, but a description of how the recruitment process works. You won't be given a separate notice at each stage; Ophelos retains discretion over which of the described tools and processes are applied to any given application or interview, within the purposes set out below. This discretion does not extend to introducing automated decision-making without human review — that is addressed separately below.

What we use your data for

Your personal data will be processed for the purposes of managing Controller's recruitment-related activities, which include reviewing applications, setting up and conducting interviews and tests, evaluating and assessing the results, and as is otherwise needed in the recruitment and hiring process.

As part of this process, we use software tools — including AI-assisted tools — to help us organise, screen, and evaluate applications and interviews. This includes:

• Automated analysis of CVs and application materials to identify relevant skills and experience
• Automated analysis of interview transcripts to help summarise and score responses (see "Interviews" below)
• Generating scores, summaries, or insights to assist our recruiters

Currently, these AI-assisted outputs are advisory only. A human recruiter reviews every application and every AI-generated score or summary before any decision is made, and no application is filtered out or rejected by an automated process alone.

We may in future use automated tools to make, or take part in making, decisions about your application without human review at that stage, if we do so in a way that complies with applicable law at the time — for example, by obtaining your explicit consent, or where the decision is necessary for entering into a contract with you, and in either case only with appropriate safeguards, including your ability to request human review of, and to contest, that decision. If we intend to introduce this, we will update this notice and separately inform you before it applies to your application — this notice alone does not authorise it.

We also use historical, aggregated recruitment data to improve our processes generally — for example, to better understand which factors tend to be associated with successful hires. Where this involves data from past applicants, it is anonymised or aggregated before use, and is not used to make any decision about a specific individual.

Such processing is legally permissible under Art. 6(1)(f) UK/EU GDPR as necessary for the legitimate interests pursued by the Controller: the solicitation, evaluation, and selection of applicants for employment, and the improvement of Controller's recruitment processes.

Interviews — recording and transcription

If you're invited to an interview conducted by video or phone call, it will be recorded and automatically transcribed as a standard part of our recruitment process — this is described in this notice, which applies to your application as explained above. Where an interview is recorded:

• The interview will be recorded and transcribed using our video-calling provider (Google Meet).
• The transcript will be processed by AI tools (including models provided by Anthropic and Google) to help generate a summary and structured notes for the interview panel, and to help train and improve our own recruitment tools as described above.
• The recording, transcript, and any AI-generated summary will be stored on Ophelos's systems (hosted via Cloudflare) and in Greenhouse.
• A human interviewer/panel always reviews the AI-generated summary as part of forming their own assessment — it is a starting point for the panel, not a decision in itself.

Recording and transcribing interviews in this way is necessary for us to evaluate all candidates fairly and consistently, and is carried out under our legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) in running a fair, well-documented recruitment process.

Who we share your data with

Your personal data will be shared with the following processors, engaged by Controller to help manage its recruitment and hiring process:

• Greenhouse Software, Inc. — applicant tracking system (United States)
• Google LLC — video interview hosting/recording (Google Meet), and AI models used to help analyse application and interview materials (United States)
• Anthropic, PBC — AI models used to help analyse and summarise application and interview materials (United States)
• Cloudflare, Inc. — infrastructure and data storage supporting our recruitment tools [confirm storage region before publishing]

We use application and interview data, including through AI-assisted tools, to train and improve our own internal recruitment tools and models — for example, to refine how we identify relevant skills and experience, and to better understand what tends to be associated with successful hires. This is part of how we evaluate and improve our recruitment process on an ongoing basis.

The third-party AI providers who process this data on our behalf do not use it to train their own general-purpose AI models — it is used only to generate the specific outputs described in this notice.

International data transfers

Because the above providers are located in or transfer data to the United States, if you are located outside the United States, your personal data will be transferred to the United States once you submit it or once your interview is processed. Where the European Commission has not made an adequacy determination covering such a transfer, it is subject to appropriate safeguards, including Standard Contractual Clauses and/or the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework where the recipient is certified. You can obtain a copy of the relevant safeguards by contacting [email protected].

How long we keep your data

Your personal data, including any interview recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries, will be retained for the duration of the recruitment process and for 24 months afterwards, to allow us to consider you for other roles and manage any related legal claims, after which it will be deleted or anonymised. You can request earlier deletion at any time by contacting [email protected].

Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have the right to request access to your personal data, to request that it be rectified or erased, and to request that processing be restricted. You also have the right to data portability and the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, including interview recording — though for the reasons explained above, we may not be able to progress an application where a candidate objects to standard recording of the interview stage. In addition, you may lodge a complaint with an EU or UK supervisory authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).