Forward Deployed Engineer
Technical role · involves code
Works from inside a customer to turn a product that works into a deployment that works: finds the real problem, gets the data out and clean, builds the integration and the AI workflow on their systems, proves it with evals on their cases, and hands over a system their team can run.
Also advertised as: FDE, Deployment Engineer, Customer Engineer, AI, Implementation Engineer.
What the job involves
- Run discovery on site and write a deployment brief with a metric, owners and risks
- Extract, profile and resolve customer data across systems that were never designed to share it
- Integrate with CRMs, ERPs and legacy systems through adapters, service identities and queues
- Build AI workflows on the customer's own documents with structured output and a human gate
- Prove value with a customer-owned golden set, per-slice evals and a control group
- Deploy inside the customer's cloud, pass the security review, and hand over with a runbook
Skills this role needs
These are the actual modules taught on the track that train for this role — not a generic skills list.
- AI Foundations — optional basics (free)
- Module 0 — Are you ready?
- Week 1 — Discovery: finding the problem worth deploying against
- Week 2 — The customer's data
- Week 3 — Integration engineering
- Week 4 — Building the AI workflow on customer ground
- Week 5 — Proving it works: evals on real data
- Week 6 — Deploying inside the customer's walls
- Week 7 — The people side of deployment
- Week 8 — From one deployment to many
How to train for it
Find out where you stand as a Forward Deployed Engineer
Five questions, about three minutes, no account required.
Take the free skill check