IFS

Forward Deployed Engineer

London, England, United Kingdom · On-site · Full-time

Apply on the employer’s site ↗See how well you match this job

You apply directly with the employer. ROLIVA does not submit applications from this page and is not the employer.

About the role

Description from the employer’s posting. Check the employer’s page for the current version.

EmployerIFS
LocationLondon, England, United Kingdom
Work styleOn-site
Employment typeFull-time
Employer posted26 days ago

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 site
Lead technical discovery: separate the real bottleneck from the symptom the customer came to you with
Design 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 systems
Know the platform and AI service catalogue well enough to spot what can be reused or extended, and help customers build on top of it
Where 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 ticket
Get into the data pipelines, model serving, retrieval and evaluation behind AI-backed features, and the integrations that put them into a real workflow
Ship a working first version fast, then harden it: monitoring, feedback loops from real usage, production-grade reliability
Decide 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 job
Communicate trade-offs clearly to product owners, customer architects and non-technical stakeholders, and turn what you learn in the field into input for the roadmap

Show full description

Why 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 codebase
Languages: strong in at least one modern general-purpose language, Python included or picked up fast
Cloud and Kubernetes: building and operating cloud-native services. Azure — AKS, Blob Storage, Key Vault, Azure-hosted AI services — is highly relevant
AI and LLM integration: LLMs in production applications — model APIs, auth, gateways, reliability, latency, cost, observability
Agentic systems: agentic applications using tools, APIs and orchestration frameworks. Hands-on MCP strongly preferred
Retrieval and RAG: production retrieval systems — embeddings, vector stores, indexing, retrieval quality, evaluation
APIs and enterprise integration: REST, auth/authz, data contracts, and the patience to debug someone else's system
Deployment and IaC: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps/ArgoCD, Terraform or equivalent
Data: pipelines and comfort across relational, document, vector and object stores
Pragmatic grasp of event-driven and distributed systems, and of AI failure modes and the quality/latency/reliability/cost trade-offs
Genuinely 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.

See how well you match this job Apply on the employer’s site ↗

Check your resume against this job Free, no sign-up. Nothing you paste is stored.

Staying safe while you apply

Never pay to apply, interview or accept an offer. ROLIVA never asks you for payment to apply to a job.
Apply only through the official “Apply on the employer’s site” button, on the employer’s own site, and check that a recruiter’s email uses that employer’s own domain rather than a free email address.
Be cautious of an offer made with no real interview, or pressure to decide quickly or share financial details early.

Does something look wrong with this listing? Use “Report broken link” in the role details, or read ROLIVA’s full job-safety guidance ↗.

Preparing for this role with ROLIVA

Check the fit.
Compare the requirements with the experience you have confirmed, including gaps.
Prepare honestly.
Build interview stories and application drafts from your own evidence.
Keep track.
Save the role and record your own application status and follow-ups.

Create a free workspace or log in.