Are you ready to be a Forward Deployed Engineer?Free Forward Deployed Engineer skill check.
The Forward Deployed Engineer skill check is five multiple-choice questions, one each on Discovery, Customer judgement, Integration, Evals and Human gate. It is free, takes about three minutes, and grades you from Novice to Expert with every answer explained.
- 5 questions
- About 3 minutes
- Free
Choose a course
Every course in the AI Tutor has its own check: five questions, one per topic.
Career tracks 11 courses
For a new role: engineer, scientist, analyst or builder.
Sign up free to start. Your answers are graded when you finish and saved to your record.
The Forward Deployed Engineer skill check.Five topics, one question each.
Question 1 is below exactly as the check asks it. The answer, and why it is right, come with your result.
Forward deployed engineers are the people who turn an AI product that works into a deployment that works: they sit inside a customer, find the real problem, get the data out and clean, wire the product into systems they did not build, prove it on the customer's own cases and hand over a system the customer's team can run. The role is scarce because it needs two things that rarely arrive together: the engineering to build the integration and the judgement to know what to build.
This 3-minute check tests five decisions from the job as it is actually done: what to do in the first week on site, what a technical mistake reveals about customer judgement, how to answer a promise the systems cannot yet support, what to settle before reporting an accuracy number, and which actions a workflow should never be offered at all.
Five questions, instant results, free student account.
- Discovery
The first week decides whether you build what was asked or what was needed.
- Customer judgement
Every technical decision has a blast radius in someone else's organisation.
- Integration
The systems will not change for you; the promise has to fit what they allow.
- Evals
An accuracy number the customer does not recognise is the vendor's number, not theirs.
- Human gate
Some actions are gated by a person; the dangerous ones are not offered at all.
Your first week on site with a customer. The contract says AI triage of their exceptions queue. What do you do first?
- APresent the product roadmap to the sponsor and agree the go-live date
- BShadow the people who handle exceptions, profile thirty days of the real queue, and find where what people say, what they do and what the systems record disagree
- CAsk the vendor product team for the standard triage configuration and apply it
- DBuild the triage workflow from the demo so the customer sees progress by Friday
“Learn AI” means three things.This check tests one of them.
It tests shipping LLM systems with a customer: discovery, judgement, integration, evals and when a person signs off.
- 01
Machine learning foundations
How models learn from data: the statistics, training and evaluation underneath them.
For you ifyou want to train and judge models, as an ML engineer or data scientist.
Take the Machine Learning check - 02This check
Applied LLM engineering
Building software on models like Claude and GPT: prompts, retrieval, agents, evals and shipping.
For you ifyou write code and want to build AI features, not train models from scratch.
- 03
AI for your job
Using AI tools well in the work you already do: briefing them, checking what comes back, keeping data safe.
For you ifyou do not plan to code and want AI to make the work you do faster and better.
Take the AI for Operations check
Three steps.About three minutes.
It is free and nothing is booked. Save the report to keep it on your account.
- 01
Pick a course
Any of the 21 courses in the AI Tutor, from Generative AI to AI for Teachers. Each check covers five topics.
- 02
Answer five questions
One question per topic, four options each. Nothing is marked until you finish.
- 03
See your readiness
Your readiness out of 10, a skill map, every answer explained, and the path through the course.
Programmes that build on this check.Your result shows where to start.
Each one teaches Forward Deployed Engineer by building, and ends in deployed work graded against a rubric you can read.
Before you start.Three quick answers.
Do I need to be an engineer already?
Yes, for the course: it assumes working Python, APIs, SQL, git and one model API, and its Module 0 tests each one. The check itself is about judgement and needs no code.
How is this different from a solutions engineer?
A solutions engineer works before the deal closes; a forward deployed engineer arrives after it and owns whether the deployment delivers, with code, from inside the customer.
What happens after the snapshot?
You get an instant read on where you stand. The Forward Deployed Engineer course takes you through eight weeks and seven graded projects against one fictional customer, from discovery to handover.
Rather talk to a person?
Tell us what you want to do with AI. We’ll suggest a programme on a 15-minute call.