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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)

#61

Post by ajb »

In the semiconductor industry this role is called Field Application Engineer. They do serious work, not just slideware, as your chip probably ships with drivers that were designed months or years before you could get significant time from the customers engineers (which generally only happens after you manufacture, but you need software to prove it works well before that). So these guys are the ones who adapt it, and their feedback is valuable as they are the ones who build understanding of the customer.

However, at my old employer they didn't get commit rights to the main software repos. They had to carry around a bunch of patches which were gradually cleaned up and integrated. As I didn't directly work with them, I don't know if this says more about them or the guys managing the internal development.

It's a role that fits a different personality to that typical among software engineers. If you're bored as a dev it may suit. Pointless to try to shoehorn people into the role that don't suit it though.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#62

Post by superfrank »

lolinder wrote: post #31
superfrank wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Looking at the official description of a Forward Deployed Engineer I'm uncertain what even the nominal difference between this and a Solutions Architect is. Is the nominal difference between an archetypal FDE and an archetypal SA greater than the difference in the SA role from company to company?

Based on what I first heard it described as, yeah, I think so.

In most places I've worked SAs are generally just connecting existing pieces of a system together to meet a customers needs. They may write code, but it's often just glue to connect two bits of the system together or transform some data or something like that. They're not really contributing to the underlying product, they're just using the product and some custom code to meet a specific customer's needs.

An FDE is supposed to be closer to a regular software engineer on a product or platform team in that their goal is to solve a specific customers problem, but they're supposed to be more focused on the big picture and using their learnings to build a better product. They're still using existing systems to solve problems and writing plenty of glue code, but they're also supposed to have the leeway to contribute to the underlying product to make it better for all customers.

The simplest example I can think of would be something like a customer saying something like they need a way to convert a bunch of their data to a CSV and then send that to a certain email address every Friday. A more traditional SA mindset may be to write a Python script that runs on a cron that connects to that customers DB pulls the data, converts it to CSV, and then emails that specific email address. Even if the SA knows that's not the best way to do it, it's the tools they've been given to work work. A FDE should have the leeway and skills to go talk to a PM and their engineering team and just build an in product, self serve tool to do that (assuming everyone is aligned that that is good for the product).

Again though, what I've heard is that most FDEs at most companies are just SAs by another name.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#63

Post by Schiendelman »

paxys wrote: post #60
Schiendelman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think a PM does?

What do you think an engineer does?

You asked why the PM is needed. I'm trying to understand what you think a PM does so I can help answer your question.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#64

Post by snypher »

guessmyname wrote: post #55
slowin wrote: post #33

These used to be called "Sales Engineers" but Palantir wanted something more militant sounding. It's a shame others picked this gross term up and started using it.

Used to? Are you implying that the term “Sales Engineers” does not exist anymore?

Palantir used to call them that and no longer do.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#65

Post by stingraycharles »

Schiendelman wrote: post #56
stingraycharles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't really have anything to do with this, other than LLMs being useful for pretty much any (tech) role.

What makes you say that?

Well for full disclosure, I lead a team of forward deployed engineers at a database company. The role typically means that our engineers are embedded within the customer for extended period of times, and they work on basically devops, software engineering + some more traditional solution architecting, which is basically what the article describes.

They use LLMs in similar ways that regular engineers use. This is an engineering role, not a product / project management role. I don’t think this role is anything super special that will be revolutionized in any different way than that other engineering roles are affected.

In the end their value add is that they’re both embedded within the customer’s and our company, they’re our eyes and ears within the customer. Their purpose is not to make sales demos, their purpose is to make our software actually work properly for the customer’s needs.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#69

Post by porridgeraisin »

In the classic FDE model palantir pioneered, one of the main features was that you would use your learnings from one customer and integrate that back into your in house product, so that similar customers are serviced for cheaper later on.

With AI coding agents FDEs are now everywhere. One because they can demand a higher salary due to simply doing more due to AI. And two, because AI really accelerates the whole bespoke solution implementation thing. However, from what I hear, none of the actual "integrate that back into your in house platform" stuff is actually happening. So it's a tiny bit of a farce.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#70

Post by bravetraveler »

LowLevelKernel wrote: post #8

Is it similar to Facebook’s Production Engineer role or Google’s SRE role?

Some skill overlap but that's it. I was incredibly surprised to find what I thought was a Site Reliability Engineer role was actually 'forward deployed'. I've taken to calling it Sales Recovery Engineering (lol), or realistically, consulting while someone else negotiates, enjoying less freedom/compensation and completing extra work.

In fewer words: people want you to think so, but not really. I'd argue FDE is a change for the worse (as an employee). Less about managing your direction/service, and instead, customers.

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