Forward Deployed Engineer - Scheduling and Optimisation Staines-upon-Thames, England, United Kingdom Research and Development

At IFS, we're building the next generation of AI-native enterprise software, transforming how some of the world's largest organisations manage assets, operations and critical services. This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern AI engineering, building intelligent products that combine Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI and cloud-native technologies to solve complex, real-world business challenges at enterprise scale.

We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building production AI systems and excited by the opportunity to shape the future of enterprise software. Please note that this role requires demonstrable, hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications. Candidates whose AI experience is limited to using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot to assist software development, without demonstrable experience building AI-powered products or systems, will not meet the requirements for this role.

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 6000+ 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.

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 are seeking an experienced Software Engineer to embed directly with customers on IFS PSO, our enterprise scheduling and optimization platform (.NET 10/C# backend, Angular frontend) used to solve complex resource planning and scheduling problems at scale. This is a hands-on technical role that combines software engineering, applied optimization and direct customer engagement.

You will sit at the intersection of our optimization engine and our customers: modeling real-world planning problems, and shipping working solutions fast, embedded with customer teams under tight deadlines. This role suits an engineer who wants to solve hard optimization problems in the field, work directly with customers, and feed what they learn back into the core product.

We're AI-first: you'll be expected to make full use of AI-assisted and agentic workflows day to day, and we're looking for someone genuinely enthusiastic about using them to model problems and ship solutions faster.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customers to translate real-world scheduling and planning problems into optimization models.
• Configure, extend, and debug the core scheduling engine and related components against live customer datasets.
• Build and iterate on new solutions with customer teams, often under tight deadlines.
• Feed field learnings back to core product and engineering teams to improve the platform.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background, ideally C#/.NET; comfortable reading and modifying a large codebase.
• Hands-on experience with optimization techniques, constraint programming, mathematical/linear programming, or algorithm development.
• Comfortable working directly with customers: gathering requirements, explaining trade-offs, and presenting results.
• Bias toward shipping, with a willingness to develop and iterate quickly under ambiguity.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to work through ambiguous, real-world constraints.

Preferred / Bonus Experience

• Experience with Angular/TypeScript or other modern frontend frameworks.
• Background in workforce or resource scheduling domains.
• Experience with large-scale data modelling.
• Familiarity with enterprise SaaS platforms or vertical-specific optimization products.

Practices

• Git, automated testing, DevOps.

What Success Looks Like

• Customer scheduling and planning problems modeled accurately and solved within performance targets.
• Working solutions shipped to customers, on tight timelines.
• Optimizer performance and quality issues diagnosed and resolved efficiently.
• Field learnings translated into concrete product and engineering improvements.
• Strong, trusted relationships built with customer teams.

We believe that coming together as a community, in person, is important for innovation, connection and fostering a sense of belonging. Our roles have the right balance of remote and in-office working to enable flexibility for managing your life along with ensuring a real connection with your colleagues and the broader IFS community.