Customer Engineer

About Alltus 

We build software that uses natural language processing (NLP) and AI to help local governments work faster, more accurately, and more efficiently. Over 120 local government entities in 25 states rely on us to help drive revenues and provide important services that power society. 

Thrive, wherever you call home. Join our fully remote team and unlock a world of possibilities beyond just a paycheck:

• Globally connected, locally supported: Thrive in a vibrant online community that celebrates your unique talents, wherever you are.
• Supportive parental leave: Welcoming a new member to your crew? We've got your back with time and support to adjust.
• Home office, fully equipped: Craft your ideal workspace with our generous home office and equipment stipend.
• Plus: Flexible work arrangements, continuous learning opportunities, and much more!

This isn't just a job; it's a launchpad for personal and professional growth.

What this job actually is

A county office has bought one of our products. Their IT contact says he can get us the data nightly but hasn't said how. Their system of record runs on-prem, supported by a regional vendor with no API and no timeline for talking to us. The office that owns the data and the office that uses it are separately elected and don't share systems. There is no project manager, no QA team, and no DevOps net. The customer wants to be live January 1. You are the person who figures out the path, scopes it into a Statement of Work that holds, and carries it to go-live.

The Customer Engineer owns each customer installation end to end. You are in the room before the contract signs, running technical discovery and demos with Sales. You write the scope that goes into the contract. You stay accountable through implementation, testing, and launch. You co-own delivery with Implementation Engineering, who own hands-on code deployment and integration test suites, but the customer outcome is yours.

This is not a sales role, a pure pre-sales role, a program management or coordination role, or a backup engineering seat. It is a technical delivery owner who supports Sales in technical conversations and drives the messy middle to done. When the path isn't clean, you build the workaround yourself rather than waiting for a specialist. Escalating with a specific ask after you've worked the problem is expected. Handing it off is not.

This role is remote with regular on-site customer travel, roughly 10 days per month. On-site kickoffs and deployments at county offices are core to the job. If that isn't energizing, this won't be the right fit.

What you'll own

• Delivery from scoping through go-live. You are the accountable owner for each installation from the Sales process through launch. You scope it, you see it live. Scope creep, new requests, and mid-implementation risk are yours to manage.
• Pre-sales technical discovery and scoping. Engage prospective customers during the Sales process to understand their operations, technical environment, and vendor landscape. Ask the questions that prevent surprises after signature. Own the Statement of Work with enough precision that engineering can build against it without rework.
• Kickoff and technical foundation. Run the initial customer kickoff and stand up access, network paths, and data flow before implementation begins: system credentials, VPN and firewall coordination, SSO configuration, and third-party vendor connectivity.
• Driving blocked integrations. When a vendor is uncooperative or absent, documentation is thin, or no clean path exists, you find or build the path. You read the code and the data well enough to diagnose where and why an integration failed, inspect a county's data before building against it, and validate assumptions against the customer's actual systems rather than their description of them.
• Stakeholder translation. Hold a technical line with county IT or a CISO and explain a timeline to a non-technical assessor or elected official in the same meeting.
• Expectation and risk management. Set clear expectations on time, effort, and cost for custom requests. Surface technical risk early, especially where a customer's existing systems or vendor relationships affect the integration path.
• Launch coordination. Run kickoff, training, testing, and go-live with the customer. You are the single point of contact for third-party vendors on each engagement.
• Product feedback. Maintain expert knowledge of the product suite and feed pre-sales and implementation insight back as concrete enhancement proposals and new product opportunities.

• Delivery ownership through ambiguity. A demonstrated track record of being the last line of defense on a technical delivery with an external customer: no PM, no QA, no DevOps net, an uncooperative or absent vendor, thin documentation, and you still drove the technical path to resolution yourself. We will ask you to walk through one in detail. Scoping-only, pre-sales-only, coordinator, and handoff-and-advise backgrounds do not clear this bar.
• Pre-sales scoping ownership. You have been in the room before a contract signed, run discovery, and owned scope that got committed. Answering an account manager's questions case by case does not clear this bar.
• Python and SQL you can read and write. You use both to analyze datasets, build and validate ETL, check data mappings, and sanity-check integration assumptions. You reason about ETL, APIs, SFTP and file-based exchange, data mapping, and on-prem versus cloud environments well enough to scope accurately and earn a county's trust. You do not need to deploy code, own CI, or run infrastructure; Implementation Engineering owns that.
• Legacy and on-premise fluency. Working experience with environments where there is no API, documentation is thin, access is negotiated with a vendor who didn't design for you, and the data arrives as a nightly file. Cloud-to-cloud API integration is a real skill, but it isn't this one.
• AI as leverage, not as a crutch. You use AI tools daily and can point to workflows you've rebuilt with them. You also understand the logic of what you ship and can reason about it without a model in the loop. We will ask you to.
• Fast ramp. You can carry a hard launch within your first quarter. We work with you, but there is no six-month runway.
• Earn-it-here temperament. High ownership, low scaffolding, figure it out with support. Seniority earned elsewhere is real growth signal, but it doesn't pre-place anyone here. The right person is hungry to earn the seat and allergic to being handed a playbook.
• Travel. Roughly 10 days per month on-site at county offices across the United States. Core to the job, not occasional.

• Experience delivering technology to local government, property tax administration, or other public-sector customers.
• Familiarity with CAMA systems, county recorder systems, large ERP platforms, or other domain-specific government software.
• Experience on the implementation or conversion side of a government software vendor.
• A software engineering background with production experience shipping application code.

To save everyone time, this role is likely not right if your primary current work is:

• Pre-sales or solutions engineering where another team owns delivery after signature.
• Integration work that has only ever been REST APIs, OAuth, and cloud-to-cloud connectors.
• Platform configuration or low-code tooling without underlying code.
• Scripting-only work (PowerShell or bash without application development).
• Coordinating engineers rather than building alongside them (Technical Program Manager, Technical Product Manager, or similar).

This applies even when the domain and titles look adjacent. We judge on what you've actually done, not on the label.

Heads up: the next step after applying is a short recorded video with a few questions. Candidates who complete it give us a much better sense of who they are, and it helps us confirm that every applicant is who they say they are. We will give a week to reply with the video, and we should be able to review it within 24-48 hours to proceed with next steps. If you'd rather not, or can't, we'll review your application as submitted after the 10-day window.