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Lead Engineer, Customer Innovation
Job Location (Short): Madison, Alabama-USA
Workplace Type: Remote
Req Id: 2813
Responsibilities
The Customer Innovation team sits at the most exciting intersection in the company: where Octave's platform capabilities meet the hardest, most consequential problems our strategic customers are trying to solve. This team doesn't wait for the roadmap; they're out in front of it, co-building with customers, stress-testing new ideas, and turning bold concepts into working reality.
You know how to build things quickly without building them carelessly.
As Lead Engineer, you'll be the founding engineer of this team's technical practice. Your mandate is twofold:
Build the platform: You will design and build a working, lightweight version of the solution builder capabilities of the Octave platform, focused on co-innovation engagements. This is the environment where customers and internal teams assemble AI-powered applications from pre-vetted building blocks to prove patterns, de-risk decisions, generate buy-in, and set the bar for what the production platform becomes.
Run the engagements: You'll partner directly with strategic customers and internal teams to take hard operational problems from first brainstorm to working prototype to fully specified build package. You're equally comfortable facilitating a workshop, working in a code editor, and writing the requirements document that lets a distributed engineering team take a prototype over the finish line.
What You'll Own
Founding Platform Engineering: Design and build the co-innovation platform that powers customer engagements: the catalog of reusable building blocks (AI models, agents, data connectors, UI components), the sandbox environment, and the patterns that make each engagement better than the last.
Prototype-to-Production Governance: Own the promotion path that enables citizen developers to create production-ready capabilities: guardrails, checks, and certification steps that let a co-built prototype ship. Define what "production-ready" means and make it verifiable.
Co-Innovation Facilitation & Rapid Prototyping: Facilitate early brainstorming sessions with strategic customers (e.g., EPCs, operators, public safety organizations), bringing a feasibility mindset into the room from the first conversation. Separate the buildable from the aspirational in real time, then turn the strongest concepts into working prototypes. Be the person who answers "can we actually build that?" with a working demo instead of a slide deck.
Specification & Delivery Leadership: Package validated prototypes into clear, complete requirements documentation and technical specs for execution by our distributed engineering teams and support them during the build. You own the architecture and the quality bar while the extended team owns the volume. This is where prototypes become products.
AI Pilot Development: Architect and build customer-facing AI pilots that demonstrate real-world value of Octave's AI capabilities alongside other teams and partners, including agent-based workflows, predictive models, and intelligent automation embedded in industrial operations. Translate ambiguous challenges into structured, testable prototypes.
Reference Architectures & Integrations: Develop reusable reference architectures and integration patterns that codify how Octave connects with the broader industrial software ecosystem, including enterprise systems, SCADA, GIS platforms, and third-party data sources. Build once, enable many.
Feedback Loop to Product: Systematically capture and translate insights from customer engagements into actionable product intelligence. Be a credible, technically grounded voice in roadmap conversations by bridging customer needs and platform vision.
#LI-SK1 #LI-Remote
Education / Qualifications
Experience
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful exposure to customer-facing or pre-product roles such as solutions engineering, applied research, or innovation labs.
• Demonstrated experience building production-quality prototypes and proof-of-concept systems under real time pressure.
• Experience translating prototypes into requirements documentation and technical specifications for execution by other engineers, and providing technical direction to distributed of offshore delivery teams.
• Comfortable facilitating customer-facing working sessions. You can hold a room, guide a brainstorm toward the feasible, and keep credibility with both executives and engineers.
• Background in industrial software, engineering applications, GIS, asset management, or adjacent enterprise domains is a strong differentiator.
• Experience integrating complex enterprise systems and working with industrial data formats and protocols.
Technical Skills
• Full-stack proficiency with modern web technologies: React, TypeScript, Node.js or equivalent backend stack.
• Strong experience integrating AI/ML capabilities into enterprise workflows: agentic patterns, orchestration, and evaluation. We care about your judgment and adaptability here, not allegiance to any specific framework.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development as a core part of how you build. You use AI coding tools as a force multiplier and can raise the ceiling for others doing the same, within enterprise compliance boundaries.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerized deployment.
• Experience with data pipeline architecture, REST/GraphQL APIs, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Nice to have: experience with knowledge graphs, semantic data modeling, and/or graph databases.
About Octave
Octave provides mission-critical software that empowers organizations to make informed decisions across every stage of the asset lifecycle - Design, Build, Operate and Protect - where performance, safety, and reliability are non-negotiable and failure is not an option.
Turning complex operational data into actionable intelligence, Octave connects expertise, real-world conditions and enterprise-scale insight to improve performance, resilience and incident response where it matters most.
Octave has more than 7,000 employees in 45 countries. Learn more at octave.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
Why work for Octave?
All in. Always forward. That's the way we do things around here. We put trust in our people because we believe it's the best way to unleash potential, bring ideas to life, and keep moving ahead. And it's why we're committed to creating an environment that's truly supportive, providing you with the resources you need to support your ambitions, no matter who you are or where you are in the world.
Everyone is welcome
At Octave, we believe that diverse and inclusive teams are critical to the success of our people and our business. Here, everyone is welcome. As an inclusive workplace, we don't discriminate. In fact, we embrace differences and are fully committed to creating equal opportunities, an inclusive environment, and fairness for all.
Respect is the cornerstone of how we operate, so speak up and be yourself. You're valued here.
Recruitment Fraud Alert
Octave posts all official job opportunities on either https://careers.octave.com/ or https://www.octave.com/about/careers and communicates only from email addresses ending in @octave.com. We never request payment or personal banking information during recruitment. No offers will ever be extended without a proper interview via Teams or in person, never done over email alone. If you suspect fraud, it probably is, and contact us at careers@octave.com