Lead Engineer, Customer Innovation

Lead Engineer, Customer Innovation

Job Location (Short):
Madison, Alabama-USA Workplace Type:
Remote

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.

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.

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.

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…