Forward Deployed Engineer - IFS Copperleaf

Ifs1; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS Copperleaf is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer who collaborates across Sales, Product, R&D, and Implementation to stand up our product on customer data quickly, proving value in the deal. You prototype near-production solutions when features are lacking, turning concepts into deployable value.

You own the technical outcome from discovery through production adoption, developing reusable accelerators and shaping the roadmap. Travel up to 50% may be required to customer sites.

Qualifications

• Customer-facing and commercial ability to lead value conversations.
• AI and agentic engineering with LLM apps.
• Ability to generalize one customer solution into reusable accelerators.
• Familiar with enterprise integrations in regulated utility markets.
• Willing to travel up to 50% to customer sites.

Responsibilities

• Own discovery, scope, architecture, and implementation for strategic customers.
• Deploy prototypes and productionize value with customer data.
• Evaluate adoption, reliability, and time-to-value.
• Collaborate with Product and R&D to feed roadmaps.
• Architect for security, observability, and maintainability.

Skills

Customer-facing

AI engineering

LLM development

RAG

Prompt engineering

Agent orchestration

REST APIs

Security and reliability

Tools

ArcGIS

Maximo

PowerBI

Python

Claude Code

SQL

REST APIs

Job description

About IFS Copperleaf

IFS Copperleaf helps the world's largest asset-intensive organizations - utilities, energy, water, transportation, and more - decide where to invest billions in capital to deliver the most value, using AI-powered decision analytics. Our customers defend and optimize the infrastructure that societies depend on.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you sit cross-functionally across the Sales, Product, R&D, and Implementation teams. For our most critical pursuits, you stand up our current product on the customer's own data, fast, to prove value inside the deal. And when a customer needs something our product does not yet do, you use modern AI tools to rapidly prototype a near-production ready solution and put it in front of them. You turn "we can't do that" into "here's how," and the strongest prototypes go on to shape our roadmap. You 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 constantly 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.

What You Will Do

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.

How We Measure This Role

• Influenced ACV on deals where an FDE engaged.
• Time to first working prototype on the customer's own data.
• Graduation rate: the share of prototypes that reach production.
• Patterns and accelerators shipped, and how often they get reused on later engagements.
• Recurring gaps taken to Product, and what Product decided.

What You Bring

Required

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. The ultimate value of this role is connecting technology to real business outcomes. 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. We hire for engineering strength and teach the domain, so this is a strong plus, not a gate. Travel. Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, up to ~50%.

Preferred

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. Fluent in Angular, Python or a similar language, and comfortable wor