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What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)
- gnabgib 3mo ago(2025)
- kaizenite 3mo ago[flagged]
- g8oz 3mo agoThis term is so eye rolling. Unless the FDE has legitimized pull within the core product team they are nothing more than a glorified field engineer/technical consultant.
- yieldcrv 3mo agoI saw those comments and thought that too, but in Field Engineer and software consultant communities as well as Sales Engineering communities and Solutions engineering communities, there is a lack of relatability into the actual tasks because what Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to do is different enough and on the other side, the companies hiring for them are figuring it out on the fly. It's mostly an engineer embedded in a 'fleet' of sales people to add legitimacy to them, and also accepting that a full software engineering team isn't necessary any more and there often is pull within those company's client organizations overall, a field engineer that's ai assisted specifically to make ai automation software could overlap completely with what FDE's are doing. FDE is associated with that specifically as opposed to any other kind of software, so language exists to convey a shared concept and the term fulfills that
- vanuatu 3mo agomost companies will make the FDE role but not understand the value of the FDE org, which is to drive product strategy and function as R&D
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- protocolture 3mo agoWe have sales engineers at home.
- imglorp 3mo agoThose might be called "Field Application Engineers" in some places.
- protocolture 3mo agoForward Deployed Financial Transaction Enablement Engineers
- adamgordonbell 3mo agoMy 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.
- dbt00 3mo agoNo. 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.
- saghm 3mo agoThis 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.
- adamgordonbell 3mo agoYeah, my bad. I might have hallucinated the 'force' part. But I'm reading Karp's authorized biography, The Philosopher in the Valley, and it does say names were chosen to be legible to military. Or something like that.
- LowLevelKernel 3mo agoIs it similar to Facebook’s Production Engineer role or Google’s SRE role?
- Avicebron 3mo agoNo, it's a sales engineer/field engineer role borrowing military nomenclature because marketing
- bravetraveler 3mo agoSome 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.
- fde_my_butt 3mo ago>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=forward%20deployed%20engineer&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f... so how can you assert FDEs work with customers for the long-term
- noisy_boy 3mo ago> FDEs generally work with customers, long-term. In these days of mass layoffs every month, talking about "long-term" sounds like a cruel joke.
- dlcarrier 3mo agoI've always heard the term "field applications engineer" for the consultants the vendor supplies to integrate their product.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 3mo agoThe distinction really kinda depends on the situation. FDEs have been around for a long time in the defense contractor space and Palantir picked up the term, broadening the meaning a decent bit. Then it spread to the rest of the software/tech space. Historically FDEs in defense are engineers who would literally forward deploy out to other countries where the hardware was being deployed so that they could provide on the ground hardware and software support. They'd either literally be called FDEs, Engineer (forward deployed), field engineer, or some other title that roughly got the meaning across. You'd deploy some platform and send along an engineer or two and a few technicians. Depending on the platform or the scale of the deployment the engineers would either be normal engineers forward deploying for a few months to a year or so or you'd hire a dedicated FDE for that given deployment/site. AFAICT it became a lot less common as internet communications got better and you could do practical remote debugging and live video conferencing but you still see FDE roles in the traditional sense from time to time. But yeah then Palantir and big tech came along and basically rendered it into a glorified consultant and/or systems integrator role.
- padolsey 3mo agoTL;DR: Glorified contract role for integrating your employer's APIs with enterprise customers. Like working with mckinsey vibe PMs and being sold on fat margins you'll see none of? Perfect!
- paxys 3mo agoI 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 glorified consulting firm.
- dude250711 3mo agoIf you are sales then you get a (hopefully fat) sales commission. If you are forward deployed then you get deployed forward (away from comfortable home office).
- siva7 3mo agoOrwellian speak for ... you won't get paid like our base engineers and when we want to get rid of you, we send you to our Siberian customer because you are a forward deployed engineer haha Still i want to believe i'm wrong and it's a good job.
- fmajid 3mo agoIt's a well-paying job, but probably poison to your future career development, much as SRE or QA roles are, because you are now pigeonholed.
- mcv 3mo agoYeah, 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 with stakeholders and identifying problems I can solve, and I don't like sales. I'm far more likely to apply as Forward Deployed Engineer.
- poemxo 3mo agoI'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 highly risk averse. It's one of the few careers I get a bit jealous of, even though the burnout rate is probably pretty high.
- paxys 3mo agoIf you hear a pitch from McKinsey about being a consultant it will also sound like the coolest job in the world.
- Schiendelman 3mo agoThis job is really the stepping stone to product management - and it's the role that's going to really grow with LLMs. A mini-PM with Fable can solve tons of customer needs. Edit: I guess I'm not surprised to see the downvotes on this; I get that a lot of people on HN don't really understand product management, or don't value it. The path from engineering to product management can really start with getting closer to the customer - putting more time into understanding their needs. The reason this shifts a lot with LLMs is that a sales engineer / forward deployed engineer can tackle customer needs much more quickly with Claude Code than they could have themselves, which means these feedback loops can become a crash course in customer experimentation and understanding. Teresa Torres wrote an amazing book about continuous discovery that I use with my teams (https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/ https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/), and a third of the book is about talking to your customers every week if you can. Someone in a customer facing role who can also build code has a huge leg up compared to someone coming at product from an academic setting. Case studies in an MBA are great for strategy, but they're usually fixed points in time. Getting that nimble feedback to hone your product sense is the hardest part of getting good.
- indoorfish 3mo agoPressing needs like AI responses to questions on HN to promote themselves.
- andy99 3mo agoI’ve done some of what I think this is, working on prem with customers, and I find it funny when I see jobs for FDEs that are somehow all in-office in San Francisco. The whole idea of being forward deployed I take to mean actually deployed.
- hedgehog 3mo agoIf you are not issued body armor and K&R insurance FDE seems like the wrong term. (the use of "engineer" for non-PEs is... a fair debate)
- 8note 3mo agothe customers are also in san Francisco?
- arm32 3mo agoI've done this too, just not under the official FDE title. I've never wanted to end it all so badly before. I felt like a tutor for a bunch of man-babies, who was stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque loop. Heavy breath of relief when the contract ended.
- lahfir 3mo agoto put it in simple terms, these are people who are so good at both usage/integration of the entire product and can help the company's clients to integrate the product seamlessly into their stack. We've seen this in rise, especially OpenAI engineers having office hours inside Nvidia's campus, etc.
- naturalmovement 3mo agoInteresting choice of name for a website which contains no actual engineering.
- _pdp_ 3mo agoEvery company I have seen implements more or less the exact same stack, with a few small variations. The problem is that it is often not very good and is usually months, if not years, behind. I have already seen this in several places, including a few F250 companies. Frankly, it is a waste of time. It is expensive to build, expensive to maintain going forward, and often already dated by the time it is finished because things have moved on. Also, as much as I like code, and would personally prefer to build things in code, a lot of internal innovation happens because end users have access to agentic tools. Yet, from the outset, both OpenAI and Anthropic FDE approaches seem heavily code-driven. I might be mistaken. In my opinion, it is much better to deploy a more customisable harness that sits across the different technology stacks that is also user-friendly. But then I am biased, because that is what we do, so take this comment as you will.
- slowin 3mo agoThese 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- guessmyname 3mo agoUsed to? Are you implying that the term “Sales Engineers” does not exist anymore?
- fmajid 3mo agoSales engineers are pre-sale, FDE are both pre- and post-sale. FDEs are also much more involved in the client implementation, often they are the ones actually doing all the work, specially in government bureaucracies or large ossified corporations where no one there actually knows how to get things done.
- slowin 3mo agoSales engineers do post-sales work. Typically if they're going to do a significant amount of real work, they'd just be called "consultants".
- oooyay 3mo agoPalantir is also the kind of business where every engagement is somewhat to totally bespoke. That's a big departure from a more typical SaaS model where you focus on providing a platform that your customers build on top of with a more generic set of tools. I am curious whether this FDE direction will result in more product and platform complexity that is more difficult to unwind.
- edoceo 3mo agoBack in the lat 90s we called ourselves a "Strike Team".
- kyuuurius 3mo agoAs building becomes more and more easier, the value of pure swe goes down. I feel the only way to thrive in this environment is either a specialized engineer or a fde.
- vanuatu 3mo agothe 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 palantir in the era of saas if you only do step 1 you're basically just solutions engineers / mckinsey, and if you only do step 2 with no customer learning to your product you don't improve your platform for all the other customers. the pain becomes the moat There's a reason why this echelon of companies comp FDEs much, much more than services businesses is because you're trying to find engineering + product + customer facing in one (knew people making 200k+ 5 years ago as new grad FDEs, and the same flavour at the labs is 500k+ easy) that being said the role has evolved a lot over the years, and depending on the company it could be indistinguishable from solutions eng, or sales eng, or even dev rel.
- randysalami 3mo agoI 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
- budsniffer952 3mo agoDon't forget to mention how modest and humble you are.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ajb 3mo agoIn 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.
- RajT88 3mo agoUsed to be called Sales Engineers. Also Customer Engineers. Also Field Engineers. Also: Solutions Architect. Same shit. Different day. The wheel begins a new turning.
- gumby 3mo agoIt’s just a field engineer but with a more military-sounding name in order to attract the worst bros. A job that has existed since the 60s in computing and likely long before that
- whatever1 3mo agoTech is becoming from a margins heaven to the worst of all worlds. Super high capex (like manufacturing) in addition to headcount requirements for each additional customer (like consulting).
- porridgeraisin 3mo agoIn 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.
- jdw64 3mo agoIn East Asia, there's a role called 'SI' (Systems Integration), but it's rarely recognized as proper career experience. It seems to be different in the West. The reason it's hard to get career recognition is that every company uses different stacks, so you're expected to know a lot of different technologies, but it's hard to go deep in any of them. And the company-specific technologies don't help when you change jobs, so you're effectively treated as bottom-tier. That's what I do for a living too. In fact, most hardware manufacturers stick with legacy technologies for 'stability' reasons, but that experience is rarely recognized as valuable career capital
- nijave 3mo agoEveryone got tired of renaming sysadmins so they moved on to a new role to rename.
- throwaway81523 3mo agoThis is a paywalled thing that's bloaty in the visible portion and then hits a subscription block before the interesting parts. Bah.
- tesnorindian 3mo agoIn 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.
- stuaxo 3mo agoThis sounds like wearing too many hats, I don't think it's the best use of people.
- jappgar 3mo agoBecause the software platforms are so jank you need dedicated support personnel... That, and you laid off all your FTEs so you could afford the shiny platform your execs bought after a disgusting night of excess debauchery.
- m3047 3mo agoI've been a Forward Deployed Engineer practically speaking, and properly construed the title correlates well with the personal sobriquet "hacker tourist". I've been to Prudhoe Bay, places I won't name here; factories; other things which were basically factories but maybe you wouldn't realize this from the outside. I've done some odd remote contracts, such as hunting medical devices on hospital networks (they're like SCADA, but without the Purdue Model). I've bridged between the customer's technical team and the vendor / provider's technical staff... when there was vendor technical staff. Other times it's been more like a treasure hunt or something (sometimes there are real bad guys) and I've been there to bridge a gap between broader industry knowledge and the onsite technical team. I'm getting pings from recruiters based in the Bay Area about "forward deployed engineers" in SF metro. It's not one of the labs, there are no mech or electrical engineers, nothing is going to escape, catch fire, or explode, nor is the inventory heavily guarded. It is bullshit; a con, so you won't notice you're being asked to establish nexus in CA. I'm tired of flying (although if you need me to literally parachute or rappel in, I'm getting a little old but we can talk), but I'm happy to drive anywhere in the greater Pac NW (no more than two days out from Puget Sound metro).
- animex 3mo agoIs this the same as a GTM (Go-To-Market) Engineer?
- altairprime 3mo ago"Customer-embedded engineers" or "Site engineers" are two useful non-military way to phrase this.