Interesting choice of name for a website which contains no actual engineering.
What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#22I'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are…
This job is really the stepping stone to product management - and it's the role that's going to really grow with LLMs. A mini-PM with Fable can solve tons of customer needs.
Edit: I guess I'm not surprised to see the downvotes on this; I get that a lot of people on HN don't really understand product management, or don't value it. The path from engineering to product management can really start with getting closer to the customer - putting more time into understanding their needs.
The reason this shifts a lot with LLMs is that a sales engineer / forward deployed engineer can tackle customer needs much more quickly with Claude Code than they could have themselves, which means these feedback loops can become a crash course in customer experimentation and understanding.
Teresa Torres wrote an amazing book about continuous discovery that I use with my teams (https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/), and a third of the book is about talking to your customers every week if you can. Someone in a customer facing role who can also build code has a huge leg up compared to someone coming at product from an academic setting. Case studies in an MBA are great for strategy, but they're usually fixed points in time. Getting that nimble feedback to hone your product sense is the hardest part of getting good.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#23>FDEs are sometimes mistakenly thought of as consultants, but the difference between consultants and FDEs is that the former make one-off recommendations, whereas FDEs generally work with customers, long-term. ...sounds like a consultant to me! Also, even if "long-term" was an important distinction, the term FDE itself became popular a very short time ago !!! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q…
> even if "long-term" was an important distinction, the term FDE itself became popular a very short time ago!!! [] so how can you assert FDEs work with customers for the long-term
That's pretty straightforward; even if the role came to exist two months ago, you can still have signed a five-year service contract.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#24I'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are…
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Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#25I'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are…
I agree that the idea is cool, but from what I've heard from people in the role at most companies it's essentially a solutions architect role by another name.
Funny enough, the Pragmatic Engineer (author of the post linked) had a follow up from about a year after the post above and he reports the same thing.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-forward-deploye...
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#26Every company I have seen implements more or less the exact same stack, with a few small variations. The problem is that it is often not very good and is usually months, if not years, behind. I have already seen this in several places, including a few F250 companies.
Frankly, it is a waste of time. It is expensive to build, expensive to maintain going forward, and often already dated by the time it is finished because things have moved on.
Also, as much as I like code, and would personally prefer to build things in code, a lot of internal innovation happens because end users have access to agentic tools. Yet, from the outset, both OpenAI and Anthropic FDE approaches seem heavily code-driven. I might be mistaken.
In my opinion, it is much better to deploy a more customisable harness that sits across the different technology stacks that is also user-friendly. But then I am biased, because that is what we do, so take this comment as you will.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#27>FDEs are sometimes mistakenly thought of as consultants, but the difference between consultants and FDEs is that the former make one-off recommendations, whereas FDEs generally work with customers, long-term. ...sounds like a consultant to me! Also, even if "long-term" was an important distinction, the term FDE itself became popular a very short time ago !!! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q…
In the automotive industry it's not uncommon for contracts to require an on-site engineer, basically FDE.
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#28I’ve done some of what I think this is, working on prem with customers, and I find it funny when I see jobs for FDEs that are somehow all in-office in San Francisco. The whole idea of being forward deployed I take to mean actually deployed.
If you are not issued body armor and K&R insurance FDE seems like the wrong term. (the use of "engineer" for non-PEs is... a fair debate)
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#29I’ve done some of what I think this is, working on prem with customers, and I find it funny when I see jobs for FDEs that are somehow all in-office in San Francisco. The whole idea of being forward deployed I take to mean actually deployed.
the customers are also in san Francisco?
Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
#30I'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are…
If you hear a pitch from McKinsey about being a consultant it will also sound like the coolest job in the world.