Kearney PERLab Velocity Platform Forward Deployed Engineer

Kearney PERLab Velocity Platform Forward Deployed Engineer

Full-time

INDIA

Bangalore (strong candidates from other Indian cities considered)

Job description

As a Forward Deployed Engineer for Kearney PERLab, you will contribute to consulting project teams as they offer honest advice and practical guidance to our clients. Depending on each client’s unique needs, projects can differ in length, size, and location, giving you unique, hands-on experiences across a range of industries and service practices.

Velocity is how PERL delivers. It is our operating system: the codified expertise, data, analytics and engagement learnings of the entire practice, running underneath every PERL engagement. Increasingly, our clients want the tool, not only the recommendation. You will be the engineer who builds it for them. When a client problem calls for a digital solution rather than a set of one-time recommendations, you take the half-formed business need, decide what to build, build it with agentic coding tools in days rather than months, prove it on real client data, and hand it off: to the Velocity Development Team if it should become a reusable module, to Activate, our delivery team, if the client wants it hardened and run.

The industry changes with every engagement: MedTech one quarter, consumer goods the next, defence after that. What carries across is the method, not the domain: understand the problem, build the smallest thing that proves it can be solved, put it in front of the client, iterate, hand off. You are measured on how often that produces working software the client values, not on code volume or sprints completed.

This is not a sprint-based role: there is no scrum master or groomed backlog, and you will often be the only engineer on an engagement. It is not a feature-implementation role: nobody hands you tickets or designs. And it is not a platform or production-hardening role: the Velocity Development Team owns the platform and Activate owns enterprise-grade security, performance and operations. You solve the problem the first time; they make it reusable and robust.

About Kearney PERLab

Kearney PERLab (Product Excellence and Renewal Lab) is Kearney’s global dedicated practice for “everything product.” We help clients make products that consumers fall in love with. Our design-driven approach to gross margin transformation offers end-to-end capabilities to support growth at every point in a product’s life cycle.

PERLab combines 100 years of Kearney’s operational expertise with award-winning design and cutting-edge proprietary data tools to unlock tangible product gains. With experts across product design, product development, sustainability, user experience, industrial design, IoT, consumer insights, product engineering, packaging design, and manufacturing excellence, PERLab’s end-to-end capabilities can support your growth at any point in your product’s life cycle.

PERLab has studios in Chicago, Stuttgart, Bengaluru, Hamburg, and Shanghai, with clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to private equity portfolio firms.

We operate across three core capability areas:

• Insights & Strategy: Consumer intelligence, brand assessment, and portfolio optimization to drive profitable growth.
• Product Engineering & Design: Architecture, benchmarking, and component optimization from concept through production.
• Sustainability & Manufacturing Excellence: Cost-efficient manufacturing at scale with sustainability built in by design.

Our flagship technology platform, Velocity AI, is a PERLab accelerator powered by agentic AI — rebuilding product development as a smart, connected system. Velocity AI connects intelligent agents across the product life cycle, automating tasks, learning continuously, and enabling products to be delivered faster and at lower cost while ensuring sustainability and market relevance.

What will you do

• Sit in the first client and consultant conversations, separate the problem from the requested feature, and write the specification yourself
• Negotiate data access with client IT and security, and work with what exists: partial exports, messy spreadsheets, a read-only database view
• Build with Claude Code, Codex or equivalent as your default, reusing Velocity modules and consuming the platform through its governed interfaces before writing anything new. Client data stays in the client’s environment or its own isolated tenant; it never enters the platform core
• Work alongside AI coding agents, specifying, directing and reviewing their output rather than writing everything by hand, and own what they wrote: test it against the client’s data and edge cases and know where it is fragile. “It looked right in the demo” is not proof
• Put working software in front of client users early, in their environment where possible and within the deployment model the platform team sets, and run the demo yourself
• Package the solution for handoff: reusable parts and data contracts for the Velocity Development Team; architecture, shortcuts taken and deploy steps for Activate; and a one-page account of how the problem was solved so the next engineer does not start from zero
• Travel to client sites, mostly in the Gulf, for kick-offs, key demos and deployments (expect 20–30% during active engagements)

Who you are

After nearly 100 years, we know this business is fundamentally about making connections—between facts, figures, insights, strategies, tools, technologies, and above all, people. That’s why we look for collaborative, insightful, and inquisitive problem-solvers who don’t accept the first thing in front of them and who are always unapologetically themselves.

We care more about how you think than which tools you have used. Producing code has become cheap; knowing what to build, whether it is correct and how to get it running inside a client’s environment is what we hire for.

We are especially interested in people who have changed discipline during their career and carried the earlier one with them, who have built something before an established pattern for it existed, and who have walked away from a technology they had mastered because something better came along. Former technical founders are encouraged to apply.

A career spent entirely inside one team, one stack and one sprint cadence is not what this role needs.

We want to hear from you if you-

• Have 4 to 10 years of relevant experience. A degree from a leading engineering or computer science institution is preferred, or equivalent depth of practice. We weigh what you have built recently far more heavily than total years
• Have shipped a product that people used, from an unclear starting point and without being asked, and you can tell us what you got wrong about it
• Can sit with a non-technical business owner, understand what they actually need, and write down what to build and what not to build; you are comfortable saying “the thing you asked for is not the thing you need”
• Work fluently with AI development agents and can direct and review their output well enough to find the bug, the security hole and the shortcut. You can make architectural decisions and defend them
• Have got software running inside someone else’s locked-down environment: access requests, security reviews, data you cannot move, and treat that as part of the build rather than a blocker
• Are strong across the full stack and enough of a generalist to be alone on a project: Python and TypeScript, a modern web framework, SQL and data pipelines, containers and at least one major cloud, LLM APIs and agent patterns in production. We are more interested in what you have shipped than which frameworks you shipped it in
• Have delivered in a domain you did not know when you started; curiosity about how a medical device, a consumer product or a defence system is actually made is not optional
• Have a Client-Facing Mindset and communicate clearly with stakeholders, domain experts, and non-technical audiences, including saying “I don’t know, I’ll find out”
• Exposure to consulting, agency or prior forward-deployed work, physical product companies (manufacturing, R&D, PLM/CAD data), Gulf or multinational enterprise clients, or LLM evaluation and testing would be advantageous

Levels

We hire at three levels, with the same job and a widening scope:

• Forward Deployed Engineer (4+ years): carries a bounded MVP once the problem is framed with a senior colleague; works directly with client users and demos own work
• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (7+ years): owns a full engagement from first conversation to handoff and the technical relationship with the client team; mentors; supports proposal scoping
• Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (10+ years, or an exceptional track record): runs several engagements in parallel on the least-defined problems; shapes engagements with the partner; sets technical standards and decides what becomes a Velocity module; hires

What we can offer you

Every day, our people work to be the difference for our clients, our communities, and our colleagues. Helping them make an impact, they are sustained by a competitive remuneration package plus comprehensive benefits and perks, including but not limited to:

• Generous retirement/pension savings contributions
• Comprehensive medical insurance for employees and their families
• Non-partner equity-based awards (for consulting managers and above)
• Structured and on-the-job learning and development opportunities
• Personalized opportunities including talent mobility, flexible work programs and externships to help you chart a unique career journey to pursue your own personal and professional goals

Read more about our benefits and how you can make your mark, your way at Kearney.com/careers.

Apply now

Submit your CV (doc or .pdf format only) via our website.

Interview process

If your profile is shortlisted, we will reach out to you with further details on the interview process. Expect a live build with agentic coding tools on a realistic, underspecified client brief, a walkthrough of something you have shipped, and a client-case conversation with a PERLab consultant.

Equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination

Kearney prides itself on providing a culture where our employees belong and thrive equally, which means our people feel comfort, confidence, and joy as they do great things for our firm, our colleagues, and our clients. That’s why Kearney is committed to building a diverse workforce and inclusive environment. Kearney is an equal opportunity employer; we recruit, hire, train, promote, develop, and provide other conditions of employment without regard to a person’s gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, religion, age, national origin, disability, marital status, pregnancy status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other differences consistent with applicable laws. This includes providing reasonable accommodation for disabilities or religious beliefs and practices. We encourage everyone to apply, including those who may not feel historically represen