Hiring: Forward Deployed Engineer | IFS Copperleaf Company: IFS Location: Itasca, IL Job Posted Time: 2026-09-10 14:11:40 Employment Type: Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : AI, Angular, LLM, Oracle ERP, Product Management, Python, R, RAG, REST, SAP, SQL About the job Required Skills: •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. •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. •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. Qualifications: •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. •You can generalize what you built for one customer into a reusable accelerator the team applies on the next engagement. •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. •(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. •Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, up to ~50%. •Software or data engineering background. •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. Compensation: •$145,000 - $180,000 / year •Flexible work environment (work from home / hybrid options) Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!