Forward Deployed Engineer | IFS Copperleaf

About IFS Copperleaf: IFS Copperleaf helps the world’s largest asset-intensive organisations — utilities, energy, water, transportation, and more — decide where to invest billions in capital to deliver the most value, using AI-powered decision analytics. Its customers defend and optimise the infrastructure that societies depend on.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you sit cross-functionally across the Sales, Product, R&D, and Implementation teams. For the most critical pursuits, you stand up the current product on the customer’s own data, quickly, to prove value inside the deal. When a customer needs something the 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 the roadmap.

You own the technical outcome from discovery through production adoption. The role involves winning deals by delivering quickly 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 organisations. You are the shaper who understands customers’ needs, hypothesises on value, co-creates the solution, and tests, measures, and validates the outcomes.

You will work alongside Solutions Consultants and Account Executives with innovative and strategic accounts and important new opportunities. You will own discovery, technical scoping, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionisation, adoption, and handoff for strategic customer solutions, deploying and proving value. You will prototype aggressively and productionise deliberately. For sales and product-management validation, you will build the smallest safe prototype that tests the hypothesis within the deal’s timeline. For production use, you will engineer for security, reliability, observability, maintainability, and integration with the customer’s architecture.

You will build, deploy, and evaluate with customer data; measure adoption, workflow impact, reliability, and time-to-value; and iterate with technical and business stakeholders. You will partner closely with Product and R&D to turn validated customer patterns and production evidence into supported roadmap investments, reusable components, and platform improvements. You will turn recurring needs into reusable accelerators so the whole team moves faster, and develop solution specifications with customers to feed product and engineering understanding, continuously updating the specification as the solution and outcomes evolve. You will work with Product to evaluate business potential, broader market needs, competitive differentiation, and functional and technical specifications as business value emerges and outcomes become known.

Success will be measured by influenced ACV on deals where an FDE engaged; time to the first working prototype on the customer’s own data; the proportion of prototypes that reach production; patterns and accelerators shipped and reused on later engagements; and recurring gaps taken to Product and the resulting product decisions.

You should be able to run technical discovery sessions, hold value conversations with technical and business stakeholders, and connect what you build to the customer’s outcome and the deal’s value case. You should be able to generalise what you built for one customer into a reusable accelerator. Required technical experience includes LLM application development, RAG, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration, including judgement about single versus multi-agent patterns and handling memory and state. Modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code should be part of your daily practice.

You should be familiar with enterprise integrations in a regulated utility market, including customer systems such as ESRI ArcGIS/Smallworld, IBM Maximo/EAM, SAP/Oracle ERP/PPM, and PowerBI/reporting systems, as well as REST and streaming APIs, authentication patterns, and integration with enterprise systems of record. Experience in asset-intensive industries such as utilities, energy, or transportation, or in capital and asset investment planning, is a strong advantage but not a requirement. You must be willing to travel to customer sites as needed, up to approximately 50%.

Preferred experience includes a software or data engineering background, having built and shipped working software and code that another engineer can maintain; fluency in Angular, Python, or a similar language; comfort working in unfamiliar languages and codebases; knowledge of SQL, data modelling, and pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and serving; strong debugging instincts with imperfect customer data in live environments; depth in production engineering, observability, performance, and operating at scale; prior customer-facing technical work, solutions engineering, forward deployment, technical consulting, or experience in a startup where you wore several hats; and experience deploying AI in enterprise or regulated environments.

The role suits a deep listener who is focused on understanding problems and delivering outcomes; a creator who builds and prototypes quickly; an AI-native and product-minded engineer with the judgement to distinguish what is credible to demonstrate from what to promise; someone comfortable building securely alongside a deal team without owning the relationship; a communicator who understands the cross-functional nature of the work and can engage with everyone from investment planners to boardroom executives; and a storyteller who can explain how what they have created changes behaviours, processes, and mindsets.

IFS embraces flexibility and hybrid work opportunities while valuing inclusive workplace experiences and engagement with colleagues. This is a new role.