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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)

#81

Post by saghm »

dbt00 wrote: post #51
adamgordonbell wrote: post #6

My 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.

No. They used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.

This is useful context, but given that you're saying "delta" was in use over a decade ago and that you don't have any firsthand knowledge in the time since, it seems at least a little presumptuous to confidently asset that people didn't start colloquially saying "force" afterwards.

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

#82

Post by randysalami »

poemxo wrote: post #14

I'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 I did that to the best of my ability, I’d want to be a boss and not a chump. The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree. These are important questions for the EV calculation

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

#83

Post by saghm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23
fde_my_butt wrote: post #11

>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.

> That's pretty straightforward; even if the role came to exist two months ago, you can still have signed a five-year service contract

Does the contract require that keep the same person "forward-deployed" with them the whole time? If not, then it's pretty presumptuous to claim that we know they'll be there in the long term because of the contract, and if so...that's some pretty incredible job security!

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

#84

Post by randysalami »

vanuatu wrote: post #52

the main distinction i like to make is: your FDEs shape your product strategy, and should be considered R&D. after making sure a customer deployment is successful (by any means necessary btw, even if it means building new systems outside of the product), the crucial next step is to drive the product improvement with PMs and core software engineers after contact with reality. this was a pretty radical idea from palant…

I put something similar another comment. What you describe is a tough job that requires dedication and the ability to objectively differentiate yourself through your work across multiple disciplines. I’ll copy it here: “The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree” I worked at a technical consultant out of college and it was a lot of the first category but often my small team did step 2. Yet it was never promoted by the larger corporate hierarchy because the incentives were not there. I would love to a job like this because I’m so nerdy but also charismatic and have perspective. Knowing myself and how dedicated I would be, I wouldn’t take anything less than 250kz

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #77
paxys wrote: post #13

I remember interviewing at Palantir back when they were making this role popular (probably a decade ago). I wanted to be an SDE and the recruiter kept pushing me towards this “forward deployed engineer” role. After hearing the pitch I went…oh so you want me to be a sales consultant? They did not take this well, I guess because Palantir was trying very hard to convince the world they were a tech unicorn and not a glor…

Yeah, I'm reading this and find myself wondering what's so new about this. Haven't tech companies always had this role? I suppose Forward Deployed Engineer sounds more like an engineering role than Sales Consultant, which sounds like you're a salesman rather than an engineer, so it feels to me like this is mostly PR to make the role more attractive to engineers. It's certainly working on me, because I like talking wi…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by tesnorindian »

In this AI era, we would also require a new role named "Backward Stability Engineer" whose job would be the exact opposite of FDE. The core of this role would be to defend from modern AI slop code updates, 0 downtime integrations, deterministic automation etc. Fusing LLM with Legacy systems will be their art.

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

#87

Post by fny »

paxys wrote: post #13

I remember interviewing at Palantir back when they were making this role popular (probably a decade ago). I wanted to be an SDE and the recruiter kept pushing me towards this “forward deployed engineer” role. After hearing the pitch I went…oh so you want me to be a sales consultant? They did not take this well, I guess because Palantir was trying very hard to convince the world they were a tech unicorn and not a glor…

The FDE is really the consolidation of two existing roles: solutions architect and engineer.

In the old days, sales would close a client with the help of someone in technical sales and a solutions architect that would come up with a high level spec for a solution. That spec would be fleshed out post sales and then given to an engineer to develop.

Today the FDE often does both.

The difference between Palantir and pure consulting is that Palantir has a core software platform that they customize per client. The business model is more akin to IBM or SAP products.

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

#88

Post by budsniffer952 »

randysalami wrote: post #84
vanuatu wrote: post #52

the main distinction i like to make is: your FDEs shape your product strategy, and should be considered R&D. after making sure a customer deployment is successful (by any means necessary btw, even if it means building new systems outside of the product), the crucial next step is to drive the product improvement with PMs and core software engineers after contact with reality. this was a pretty radical idea from palant…

I put something similar another comment. What you describe is a tough job that requires dedication and the ability to objectively differentiate yourself through your work across multiple disciplines. I’ll copy it here: “The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree” I worked at a technical…

Don't forget to mention how modest and humble you are.

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

#90

Post by Schiendelman »

stingraycharles wrote: post #65
Schiendelman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

OK, we both have the same understanding.

I'm saying giving an FDE the ability to significantly modify code for customer needs using a powerful frontier model will make their job more about customer discovery and strategy than about engineering, a big shift of ratio of where they spend their time. It will make the feedback loops tighter, let them experiment faster.

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