Forward Deployed Engineer | Merchandising

Forward Deployed Engineer

Who we are

RELEX Solutions builds supply chain and retail planning software for retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. Our customers use RELEX to forecast demand, plan inventory and decide what goes where, across stores, warehouses and factories.

The role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer you work embedded with one customer and apply the full RELEX platform to that customer’s operation. You own delivery from discovery to go-live, prove the value it creates, and feed what you learn back into the product. The strongest of your prototypes go into the RELEX roadmap.

This is a field role. You work on-site with customers, solo or in pairs, on high-visibility problems for weeks at a time.

What you’ll do

Scope pilots, set go/no-go criteria and run the stakeholder side yourself, from operational users to IT and supply chain leadership
Challenge requirements until you and the customer agree on what they need
Write and ship production code: configuration, extensions, integrations and Plan Plugins, reviewed and tested, including code you build with AI agents
Put applied ML to work in the customer’s live operation: forecasting, optimisation and automated decisions
Work around customer data that arrives late, incomplete or wrong
Measure outcomes against the customer’s baseline and explain the business case to a store manager or a CFO
Be the customer’s first call when something breaks
Spot where the account can grow and take it forward with pre-sales
Prototype capability from what the field teaches you, and hand it to Product Engineering when it’s ready for every customer

What you’ll bring

You write and ship production code yourself. This isn’t a role for someone who specs work for others to build
You’ve put applied ML into production (forecasting, optimisation or automated decisions), beyond a notebook
Hands-on experience with cloud (GCP and Cloud Run, or the AWS or Azure equivalents), SQL and data modelling, data pipelines and API integration
You use AI coding tools such as Claude Code in your real workflow
Experience working directly with enterprise customers in a technical or solutions role
Fluent English, plus professional fluency in the business language of the country you’re based in
Supply chain or retail knowledge is a plus. We hire for engineering first

How the job runs

Travel: expect 30%+ travel in peak periods, including several consecutive weeks on-site during bootcamp and go-live, sometimes at short notice
On-call: during deployment weeks you’re part of an on-call rotation, and go-live incidents don’t keep office hours
Location: you can be based in any country where RELEX has customers. You work with customers in or near your own region, in their time zone and their language
Relocation: depending on customer assignment, relocating after around 6 months of onboarding may be on the table

Levels

We hire from Associate to Lead FDE. Progression is based on what you deliver across engagements, not time served.

How we hire

Application: your CV plus a few questions on travel, right to work and your hands-on experience
Alva Labs assessment: an online logic test and personality questionnaire, done in your own time
Recruiter screen and info session: we go through your background and the role, including the travel and on-call reality, and you ask us anything
Hiring manager interview: a deep dive into customer work you’ve owned end to end, including what went wrong
Business case: you are being presented a realistic customer problem, then present your solution and its business value to a non-technical audience
Live coding session: you solve a real problem on an unfamiliar stack, using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, with our engineers in the room