Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, R&D AI Services, you embed directly with product development teams to understand real business problems and work out the right way to solve them with AI: reusing and extending an existing AI service, or — when nothing suitable exists — scoping the requirements and working with the engineering team to build one. You are the bridge between a product team's business flow and a working AI capability: you know the AI service catalogue well enough to match the right service to the problem, you help teams build AI-first applications on top of it, and when a gap exists, you make sure the right thing gets built to close it.

This is a high-agency role for a hands-on senior engineer who is as comfortable in a stakeholder conversation about a business process as they are building and shipping the data pipeline or model-serving system behind it.

What you'll do

• Embed directly with product teams (your internal customers) to understand their business flows and work out where AI genuinely helps

• Lead technical discovery: separate the actual bottleneck in a business process from the symptom the product team came to you with
• Know the existing catalogue of AI services well enough to spot where one could be applied or extended to solve a product team's problem, and help them design and build AI-first applications on top of it
• Where no existing service fits, gather and document the requirements yourself, then partner with the engineering team responsible for AI services to scope, design, and build the new service — you're hands-on throughout, not just handing off a ticket
• Get hands-on with the data pipelines, model training and serving, and MLOps tooling behind both new and existing AI services, plus the integrations that connect them into product workflows
• Ship a working first version fast, then harden it: proper monitoring, feedback loops from real usage, and production-grade reliability
• Translate product team pain points and business requirements into actionable input for the AI services roadmap
• Work directly with product owners, business stakeholders, and engineering leads — going deep into the data and code while communicating trade-offs clearly to non-technical audiences
• Be the connective tissue between IFS R&D's AI capability and the product teams consuming it — your field insights shape what gets built next