Forward Deployed Engineer | IFS Copperleaf

IFS•Itasca, IL

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you will play a crucial role across Sales, Product, R&D, and Implementation teams. Your primary responsibility is to rapidly deploy and demonstrate the value of our current product using customer data for critical sales pursuits. When customers require functionalities not yet present in our product, you will leverage modern AI tools to quickly prototype near-production-ready solutions. You will transform challenges into solutions, with the strongest prototypes potentially influencing our product roadmap. You will own the technical outcome from initial discovery through to production adoption, ensuring deals are won by delivering fast, valuable, and production-ready solutions. This involves prototyping, articulating value based on customer requirements, measuring and proving value across customer workflows, and continuously relaying field-observed customer needs, ideas, roadmaps, and visions to the product and sales organizations. You are instrumental in understanding customer needs, hypothesizing value, co-creating solutions, and validating outcomes through testing and measurement.

Requirements

Customer-facing and commercial ability: capable of running technical discovery sessions, holding value conversations with technical and business stakeholders, and connecting built solutions to customer outcomes and deal value.
Ability to generalize solutions built for one customer into reusable accelerators for the team.
Expertise in AI and agentic engineering, including LLM application development, RAG, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration, with judgment for single vs. multi-agent patterns and handling memory/state.
Proficiency with modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code.
Familiarity with enterprise integrations in a regulated utility market.
Familiarity with key customer systems such as ESRI ArcGIS/Smallworld, IBM Maximo/EAM, SAP/Oracle ERP/PPM, and PowerBI/reporting systems.
Technical and functional understanding of REST and streaming APIs, authentication patterns, and integrating with enterprise systems of record.
Domain knowledge in asset-intensive industries (utilities, energy, transportation) or capital and asset investment planning is a strong plus.
Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, up to ~50%.

Nice To Haves

Software or data engineering background with experience building and shipping production-ready software.
Fluency in Angular, Python, or similar languages, and comfort working in unfamiliar languages and codebases.
Understanding of SQL, data modeling, and building data pipelines.
Strong debugging instincts against imperfect customer data in live environments.
Depth in production engineering: observability, performance, and operating at scale.
Prior exposure to customer-facing technical work, solutions engineering, forward deployment, technical consulting, or a startup environment.
Prior experience deploying AI in enterprise or regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Work alongside Solutions Consultants and Account Executives on strategic accounts and important net new opportunities.
Own discovery, technical scoping, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionization, adoption, and handoff for strategic customer solutions.
Deploy and prove value by building the smallest safe prototype that tests the hypothesis within the deal's timeline.
Engineer prototypes for security, reliability, observability, maintainability, and integration with the customer’s architecture for production use.
Build, deploy, and evaluate solutions with customer data, measuring adoption, workflow impact, reliability, and time-to-value, and iterating with stakeholders.
Partner closely with Product and R&D to translate validated customer patterns and production evidence into supported roadmap investments, reusable components, and platform improvements.
Develop reusable accelerators to improve team efficiency.
Develop solution specifications with the customer to inform product and engineering, updating them as the solution and outcomes evolve.
Collaborate with Product to evaluate business potential, broader market needs, competitive differentiation, and functional/technical specifications as business value emerges.