About this role
Most engineers ship into a backlog. You'd ship into a customer's operation.
We build the workforce, project, scheduling and service systems companies use to run the physical world — manufacturing, energy, aerospace and defense, construction, telecom, field service. As a Forward Deployed Engineer you embed directly with those customers, work out where software and AI genuinely help, and build it in front of them. Days and weeks, not quarters.
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 service behind it.
What you'll do
Embed with customers to understand their actual operation — their data, their constraints, their people — rather than working from a requirements document written by someone who's never been on siteLead technical discovery: separate the real bottleneck from the symptom the customer came to you withDesign and ship full-lifecycle features across front-end and back-end, and build or extend the APIs and event-driven services that connect workforce, project, scheduling and financial data across IFS Cloud and customer systemsKnow the platform and AI service catalogue well enough to spot what can be reused or extended, and help customers build on top of itWhere nothing fits, gather the requirements yourself and partner with the owning engineering team to scope and build it — hands-on throughout, not handing off a ticketGet into the data pipelines, model serving, retrieval and evaluation behind AI-backed features, and the integrations that put them into a real workflowShip a working first version fast, then harden it: monitoring, feedback loops from real usage, production-grade reliabilityDecide what survives. Some of what you build proves a point and gets deleted; some becomes product for every customer. Calling that correctly, and telling a customer no, is part of the jobCommunicate trade-offs clearly to product owners, customer architects and non-technical stakeholders, and turn what you learn in the field into input for the roadmapWhy you'd want this
You see the consequences. A new problem every few months. AI-native, for real. Full ownership. A real path back into product. Attitude
Speed and attitude first. You thrive in ambiguity — you can turn "this process feels like it needs AI" into a scoped, shipped system without waiting to be told exactly what to build. Blocked, you find the way through, escalate early, or change the approach. You don't wait.
Customers trust you quickly because you're straight with them. You can talk to an architect and a shop-floor supervisor on the same day and be useful to both, without dumbing down the substance.
The bar
5+ years building and operating production systems, with the ability to work across an unfamiliar stack or customer codebaseLanguages: strong in at least one modern general-purpose language, Python included or picked up fastCloud and Kubernetes: building and operating cloud-native services. Azure — AKS, Blob Storage, Key Vault, Azure-hosted AI services — is highly relevantAI and LLM integration: LLMs in production applications — model APIs, auth, gateways, reliability, latency, cost, observabilityAgentic systems: agentic applications using tools, APIs and orchestration frameworks. Hands-on MCP strongly preferredRetrieval and RAG: production retrieval systems — embeddings, vector stores, indexing, retrieval quality, evaluationAPIs and enterprise integration: REST, auth/authz, data contracts, and the patience to debug someone else's systemDeployment and IaC: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps/ArgoCD, Terraform or equivalentData: pipelines and comfort across relational, document, vector and object storesPragmatic grasp of event-driven and distributed systems, and of AI failure modes and the quality/latency/reliability/cost trade-offsGenuinely fluent with agentic tooling in daily engineering work, not just aware of it Desireable
Enterprise or ERP software. Project- or asset-heavy industries. Consulting or solution engineering. Experience working alongside platform or infrastructure teams. Agile delivery with globally distributed teams.
We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.