Entrylevel Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs in Elgin, IL

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.

At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.

If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

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.

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.

What You Bring

Required

• Customer-facing and commercial ability. 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.
• Abstraction and reuse. You can generalize what you built for one customer into a reusable accelerator the team applies on the next engagement.
• AI and agentic engineering. 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.
• Domain in asset-intensive industries (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.
• Travel. Willingness to travel to customer sites as needed, up to ~50%.

Preferred

• Software or data engineering background. You have built and shipped real working software at some point in your career, not just scripts, and you write code another engineer can pick up and maintain. Fluent in Angular, Python or a similar language, and comfortable working in unfamiliar languages and codebases. An understanding of SQL, data modeling, and building pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and serving. Strong debugging instincts against imperfect customer data in live environments.
• 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.
• Prior experience deploying AI in enterprise or regulated environments.

Who Thrives Here

• A deep listener, who obsesses on problem understanding and values outcomes.
• A creator who builds and prototypes fast, whether standing up existing capability or inventing what does not exist yet.
• AI-native and product-minded, with the judgment to know what is credible to demonstrate versus promise.
• Secure building alongside a deal team without needing to own the relationship.
• A communicator, who understands the cross-functional nature of the work and can hold their own at the lowest level investment planner to the boardroom executive.
• A story-teller who can take what they’ve created and craft the right messaging, understanding that what they've built changes behaviors, processes, and sometimes, mindsets.

What We’re Offering

• Salary Range: $145,000 to $180,000 USD annually + bonus
• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Tuition assistance
• Community involvement and volunteering events

Additional Information

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.

Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment

As part of our recruitment process, we may use automated tools, including artificial intelligence, to help screen and assess applications based on job‑related criteria such as skills, experience, and qualifications.

These tools do not make hiring decisions. All employment decisions are reviewed and made by members of our hiring team.

This position is a new role.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer