What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
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What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
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Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#2(2025)
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#3[flagged]
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#4This term is so eye rolling. Unless the FDE has legitimized pull within the core product team they are nothing more than a glorified field engineer/technical consultant.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#5We have sales engineers at home.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#6My understanding is Palantir used the term, and calling teams of them "Delta Force" to make a consultative-and-service-heavy software adoption cycle make sense to US Military clients.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#7We have sales engineers at home.
Those might be called "Field Application Engineers" in some places.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#8Is it similar to Facebook’s Production Engineer role or Google’s SRE role?
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#9This term is so eye rolling. Unless the FDE has legitimized pull within the core product team they are nothing more than a glorified field engineer/technical consultant.
I saw those comments and thought that too, but in Field Engineer and software consultant communities as well as Sales Engineering communities and Solutions engineering communities, there is a lack of relatability into the actual tasks because what Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to do is different enough
and on the other side, the companies hiring for them are figuring it out on the fly. It's mostly an engineer embedded in a 'fleet' of sales people to add legitimacy to them, and also accepting that a full software engineering team isn't necessary any more
and there often is pull within those company's client organizations
overall, a field engineer that's ai assisted specifically to make ai automation software could overlap completely with what FDE's are doing. FDE is associated with that specifically as opposed to any other kind of software, so language exists to convey a shared concept and the term fulfills that
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#10Is it similar to Facebook’s Production Engineer role or Google’s SRE role?
No, it's a sales engineer/field engineer role borrowing military nomenclature because marketing