Forward Deployed Engineer (m/f/x)

About Virtual Identity   Virtual Identity (VI) is a digital agency built on Human-Centered Business Growth: combining empathy for people with insight from data to drive real digital success. With around 140 colleagues across Freiburg, Munich, Vienna, and Porto (and remote), we cover the full spectrum from Consulting and UX Research to UX/UI Design, Software Development, and Digital Marketing — always learning in close collaboration with our clients. As a Forward Deployed Engineer at VI, you sit at the intersection of client, product, and engineering. You're not building in isolation from a backlog handed down by someone else — you go into deep, sustained virtual immersion with the client, understand their real operational problems, and ship working software that solves them, fast. You prototype, integrate, and iterate directly with the people who will use what you build, then help harden it into something production-ready with our delivery teams. You also bring a well-founded understanding of agentic engineering — not just using AI coding assistants, but genuinely understanding how agents plan, use tools, and fail, and applying that thinking to how you build, integrate, and automate in the field. This role suits someone who's equally comfortable in a client workshop, a codebase, and a data pipeline — and who gets energy from ambiguity rather than needing it resolved before starting.   What you will do: • Embed with client teams to observe workflows, diagnose bottlenecks, and identify where custom software can create outsized impact. • Rapidly prototype and deploy solutions — internal tools, integrations, automations, data pipelines — directly in the client's environment. • Translate messy, real-world requirements into working code without waiting for a fully specified brief. • Own the full loop: build, deploy, get feedback from actual users within days, iterate. • Use agentic engineering practices — not just AI-assisted coding, but designing workflows, automations, and integrations that leverage agents as a core part of the solution, where it genuinely helps the client. • Work closely with VI's UX, consulting, and cloud-native engineering teams to transition prototypes into scalable, supportable production systems. • Navigate client infrastructure, security constraints, and existing systems (cloud platforms, APIs, legacy tools) pragmatically. • Act as a trusted technical voice in client conversations — you can whiteboard an architecture and defend it in the same meeting. • Travel to client sites as needed (frequency depends on engagement). What we expect: • Strong full-stack or cloud-native engineering experience, with a track record of shipping real software, not just prototypes that die in a demo. • Comfort working directly with non-technical stakeholders and translating their problems into technical solutions on the fly. • Solid grounding in at least one modern backend stack and one frontend stack, plus working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP). • Experience with APIs, data integration, and automation — you can connect systems that were never designed to talk to each other. • Real, well-founded knowledge of agentic engineering — you understand the underlying concepts (agent planning, tool use, context management, orchestration, evaluation), not just the tool names, and you've applied that thinking to real work, not side projects. • A bias toward action: you'd rather build a rough version and test it with real users than perfect a spec. • Strong communication skills — you can explain a technical trade-off to a client stakeholder without jargon. • Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities; forward deployed work is inherently unstructured. • Willingness to travel to client sites. • Experien