Forward Deployed Engineer | IFS Copperleaf

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 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.

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.