Junior Engineer, FDE (Agentic & Eco-System)

Forward Deployed Engineer (Applied Research)

Location: London (UK)

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands.

We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity,

next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic

counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing

platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver

transformational growth.

We work with the world's most valuable brands and have global reach across 100+

markets, with deep local expertise.

Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of

creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest

talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow.

About Data & Technology Solutions

WPP’s Data & Technology Solutions is the WPP’s unified global data products and technology

team. We work with our agencies and clients to build data-driven solutions and technology

products to power marketing transformation.

WPP Open is our AI platform for marketing, it connects marketing professionals, data, tools and

AI in a single place. WPP Open is the simplest, safest and fastest way to realize the benefits of

scaled AI – delivering better-informed creative ideas faster, at scale and at lower cost.

We’re endlessly curious and our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are

over 2,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world.

About WPP Media Solutions:

Our proprietary, opt-in media solutions give clients access to unique advantages and

cutting-edge capabilities. Through a single point of access to addressable media, we've built on

premium inventory and leveraged universal customer signals. We enable cross-channel

storytelling, cross-platform AI optimization, and robust business impact measurement to

maximize campaign effectiveness. Further information can be found here - Our Proprietary

Solutions.

About the team

Strategic Initiatives & Applied Research works at the intersection of emerging technology, client

demand and WPP’s product strategy. We build production-lite solutions to test strategically

important opportunities, prove their technical and commercial value, and turn successful work

into reusable capabilities for Product and Engineering.

Our first major programme is agentic media buying, but our remit is broader: applied AI,

agent-to-agent workflows, new platform connections and other emerging opportunities to help

shape the future of WPP’s products. We want generalists who are happy to move onto the next

frontier problem once this one is proven.

The role

Forward Deployed Engineers are hands-on product engineers who work close to clients,

publishers and the market. You will combine technical depth with commercial understanding and

consultancy-style problem solving: helping to define a problem, building the solution, testing it in

a real setting and translating what works into reusable technical capability.

This is neither isolated prototyping nor slide-led consulting. You will be accountable from

discovery through implementation, field validation and handover.

What you'll do

- Build and ship working systems fast - agentic workflows, data pipelines, interfaces and

integrations. All centered on answering a commercial question, not a technical one.

- Work directly with external partners, clients, internal operational and commercial teams

to translate ambiguous problems into deliverable technical outcomes.

- Build at production-lite quality: moving quickly while incorporating observability,

validation, sensible testing and graceful failure rather than creating either disposable

prototypes or prematurely over-engineered systems.

- Build the business case alongside the build: what it's worth, who pays for it, what it costs

to scale.

What you’ll bring

- 5+ years in software engineering, data science or a related field, with a track record of

getting things into real use.

- Strong Python and hands-on cloud experience

- Demonstrable experience building agentic/LLM systems - tool and structured calling

orchestration, evaluation, and a realistic view of what breaks when you try to get

production value out of them.

- Consultancy-style experience gained through consulting, professional services, solutions

engineering, forward deployment or an internal business-transformation function.

- Strong product and commercial judgement, with the ability to communicate technical

choices and business implications to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

- Comfort operating in ambiguity, learning unfamiliar domains quickly and balancing speed

with operational credibility.

- Willingness to travel internationally several times a year and develop a strong working

knowledge of media and advertising technology.

Nice to have

- Exposure to ad tech or media: ad servers, SSPs/DSPs, programmatic, or order

management systems

- Front-end or dashboarding skills for building demonstrable interfaces