Job description
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.
For more information, visit WPP.com.
Forward Deployed Engineer (Applied Research)
About WPP:
WPP Open is our AI platform for marketing, connecting marketing professionals, data, tools and AI in one place. It is the simplest, safest and fastest way to realize the benefits of AI at scale—delivering better-informed creative ideas faster, at greater scale and lower cost. 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, combining premium inventory with universal customer signals. They enable cross-channel storytelling, cross-platform AI optimisation and robust measurement of business impact to maximise campaign effectiveness.
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
- experience 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
We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.
WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.