Forward Deployed Engineer | IFS Copperleaf

IFS

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will sit cross-functionally across the Sales, Product, R&D, and Implementation teams. For our most critical pursuits, you will stand up our current product on the customer’s own data, fast, to prove value inside the deal. When a customer needs something our product does not yet do, you will use modern AI tools to rapidly prototype a near-production ready solution and put it in front of them. You will turn “we can’t do that” into “here’s how,” and the strongest prototypes will go on to shape our roadmap. You will own the technical outcome from discovery through production adoption. Your job is to win deals by delivering fast and with value in the current production environment, prototyping and articulating value from customer requirements, measuring and proving value across customer workflows, and continuously coordinating field-observed customer needs, ideas, roadmaps, and visions with the product and sales organizations. You are the shaper that understands customers’ needs, hypothesizes on value, co-creates the solution, and can test, measure, and validate the outcomes.

Requirements

Customer-facing and commercial ability. You can run a technical discovery session, hold a value conversation with both technical and business stakeholders, and connect what you build to the customer's outcome and the deal's value case.
Abstraction and reuse. You can generalize what you built for one customer into a reusable accelerator the team applies on the next engagement.
AI and agentic engineering. LLM application development, RAG, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration, including the judgment for when to use single versus multi-agent patterns and how to handle memory and state.
Modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code as daily practice, not novelty.
Familiar with enterprise integrations in a regulated utility market.
You’re familiar with key customer systems such as ESRI ArcGIS/Smallworld, IBM Maximo/EAM, SAP/Oracle ERP/PPM, and PowerBI/reporting systems.
You have a technical and functional understanding of REST and streaming APIs, authentication patterns, and integrating with enterprise systems of record.
Domain in asset-intensive industries (utilities, energy, transportation) or capital and asset investment planning.
Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, up to ~50%.

Nice To Haves

Software or data engineering background. You have built and shipped real working software at some point in your career, not just scripts, and you write code another engineer can pick up and maintain.
An understanding of SQL, data modeling, and building pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and serving.
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 where you wore several hats.
Prior experience deploying AI in enterprise or regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Work alongside Solutions Consultants and Account Executives with our most innovative and strategic accounts as well as our most important net new opportunities.
Own discovery, technical scoping, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionization, adoption, and handoff for strategic customer solutions.
Deploy and prove value.
Prototype aggressively; productionize deliberately.
For sales and product management validation, build the smallest safe prototype that tests the hypothesis inside the deal’s timeline.
For production use, engineer for security, reliability, observability, maintainability, and integration with the customer’s architecture.
Build, deploy, and evaluate with customer data; measure adoption, workflow impact, reliability, and time-to-value; iterate with technical and business stakeholders.
Partner closely with Product and R&D to turn validated customer patterns and production evidence into supported roadmap investments, reusable components, and platform improvements.
Turn recurring needs into reusable accelerators so the whole team moves faster.
Develop solution specifications with the customer to feed product and engineering organizational understanding, continuously updating the specification as the solution and outcomes evolve.
Work with Product continuously as business value emerges and outcomes become known to evaluate business potential, broader market needs, competitive differentiation aspects, and functional/technical specifications.