Forward Deployed AI Engineer- Aerospace & Defense Itasca, Illinois, United States Research and Development

IFS; Itasca, Northern (IL, KY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible paid time off

401K with Company contribution

Flexible spending accounts

Life insurance and disability benefits

Tuition assistance

Community involvement and volunteering

Job summary

IFS is a global software leader delivering AI-powered enterprise solutions for aerospace and defense. We embed engineers with customers to ship practical software that solves real operations problems in challenging environments.

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll own end-to-end delivery across the stack, collaborate with customers on site, and drive adoption of AI-enabled capabilities while navigating tight deadlines and regulated contexts.

Qualifications

• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer with direct customer exposure.
• Experience across backend, APIs, data models and web interfaces.
• Experience with AI-powered solutions is a strong advantage.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites.

Responsibilities

• Embed with aerospace & defense customers—on site—to learn operations and ship software.
• Design, build and test full-stack features across services, data and UI.
• Integrate IFS with ERP, CRM, IoT and legacy systems.
• Own delivery end-to-end with automated testing, CI/CD and reliability.
• Apply AI tooling and bring learnings back into the product.

Skills

Full-stack

Customer delivery

End-to-end ownership

Senior autonomy

Communication skills

Travel willingness

Job description

• Full-time

Company Description

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 6000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.

At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but also on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.

If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

Job Description

About our Aerospace & Defense business

Our Aerospace & Defense business helps the world's leading airlines, MROs, OEMs and defense operators keep complex fleets and platforms mission-ready — managing the full maintenance, asset and service lifecycle at scale. We are changing how that software gets built: closer to the operations it serves, in shorter cycles, and increasingly with AI. That means investing in engineers who work at the point of contact between our products and our customers.

Qualifications

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer in our Aerospace & Defense business, you build aviation products directly with our customers. You embed with the airlines, MROs, OEMs and defense operators who keep complex fleets flying, work alongside their people in their own environments, and turn what you see there into working software — shipped quickly, hardened in real operations, and fed back into the product so every customer benefits. This is engineering at the point of contact: the shortest path between a customer's problem and a product that solves it.

The role is deliberately broad. You build across the stack — backend services and APIs, data models and integrations, web interfaces — and you own what you ship end to end, from design and testing through deployment and operational reliability in customer environments. You connect IFS to the systems that run our customers' operations, and you do it under real constraints: live fleets, regulated processes, restricted networks and firm deadlines. AI is becoming both part of how we build and part of what we ship, so experience building AI-powered solutions is a strong advantage.

What you'll do

• Build with the customer. Embed with Aerospace & Defense customers — on their sites and inside their systems — to learn how their operation actually works, then design and ship software with them rather than for them. You shorten the loop between a real problem and a working answer.
• Ship across the stack. Design, build and test full-stack features in modern general-purpose languages — services and APIs, data and persistence, integrations and web interfaces. Breadth matters more than depth in any one framework here.
• Integrate into real operations. Connect IFS to the systems that run our customers' businesses — ERP, CRM, IoT and telemetry, and long-lived legacy and mission systems — and own the solution architecture in real customer context.
• Own delivery end to end. You build it, you run it: automated testing, CI/CD, deployment, observability and operational reliability across cloud and customer environments. When it breaks in production, you are the one who makes it right.
• Bring AI into the work. Use AI-assisted and agentic development tooling as a normal part of how you build, and help take AI-powered product capabilities into customer environments where they have to hold up under real conditions.
• Turn field work into product. Feed what you learn on site back into the core product and the roadmap, so a fix for one customer becomes a capability for all of them. You work closely with product management and the wider engineering teams to make that happen.
• Represent IFS credibly. Be the technical voice customers trust — able to work through a design with their engineers, explain a trade-off to an operations leader, and hold your own in front of partners.

What you'll bring

• Full-stack breadth: hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production software across the stack — backend services and APIs, data and integrations, and web front ends — with proficiency in modern general-purpose programming languages rather than a single domain framework.
• Customer-facing delivery: substantial experience working directly with customers, on site or embedded in their teams, to deploy, integrate, harden and support enterprise software in their own environment — including integration with systems such as ERP, CRM, IoT and legacy platforms.
• End-to-end ownership: a you-build-it, you-run-it mindset with real accountability for what you ship — quality and automated testing, CI/CD, cloud and DevOps, and security.
• Senior-level autonomy: a track record of owning significant pieces of delivery with little supervision, making sound architecture and shipping-quality calls under time pressure, and raising the standard of the engineers around you.
• Communication and judgement: excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences, comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities, and the instinct to ground technical decisions in direct customer evidence and business value.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites as the work requires.

Nice to have

• Experience building AI solutions (strongly preferred): shipping AI-powered capabilities in products — model integration, prompt engineering, RAG, agentic architectures, evaluation and testing — and/or using AI-assisted and agentic development tooling as a core part of your workflow.
• Experience working in or with Aerospace & Defense organisations, or on solutions for asset, maintenance, MRO or fleet-readiness management.
• Experience with other enterprise asset management (EAM), field service or maintenance-management solutions.
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience of agile delivery and of working with globally distributed teams.

Additional Information

What We’re Offering

• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
• 401K with Company contribution
• Flexible spending accounts
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Tuition assistance
• Community involvement and volunteering events

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer