Author here. I’ve been a software engineer for about 12 years, but only more recently in a Forward Deployed–style role embedded with customers. This post is a d

Author here. I’ve been a software engineer for about 12 years, but only more recently in a Forward Deployed–style role embedded with customers. This post is a diary of a typical week from a few weeks ago at an AI startup, working with 10 active clients. The week included: – Roughly a 50/50 split between meetings and building (coding, prompt work, debugging) – Heavy context switching across Slack/Teams, Linear, Notion, docs, etc. – Unplanned firefighting when an upstream provider (Cloudflare) went down and all our client systems felt it Happy to answer questions about: – How this work compares to “classic” SWE, solutions engineering, or consulting – What skills actually matter day to day in this kind of role – Tradeoffs: chaos, context switching, and owning both scoping and delivery – When it makes sense for a company to introduce an FDE‑type role at all