The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again - The Pragmatic Engineer
Menu
Close
Home
Newsletter
Popular Articles
The Software Engineer's Guidebook
My Books
Early trends
Reading List
Ethics statement
Write a guest article
Sponsors
Investing
Now
Contact me
About
RSS Feed
bluesky
youtube
Subscribe
Home
Newsletter
Popular Articles
The Software Engineer's Guidebook
My Books
Early trends
Reading List
Ethics statement
Write a guest article
Sponsors
Investing
Now
Contact me
About
RSS Feed
bluesky
youtube
Before we start: I'm hosting the first-ever The Pragmatic Summit on 11 February, 2026, in San Francisco. Join 400 top engineers and leaders as we answer the question: How is AI reshaping software engineering, dev workflows, and the modern engineering stack?<br>Spaces are limited - don't miss out! Buy tickets here .
-->
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of five topics from last week’s The Pulse issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.<br>Last August, we covered a sudden trend of high demand for forward deployed engineers (FDEs), and now there are signs demand is increasing more.<br>Google: FDE recruitment spike<br>Google is doubling down on FDEs and making the interview process much simpler. Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian, has announced a new, AI-focused organization within the Go-To-Market team, and is hiring a bunch of FDEs for it.<br>I’m hearing the hiring process has been shortened from 4-6 interviews held over the course of weeks, to as few as two interviews in just two days. It looks like Google is unusually eager (desperate?) to fill this job.<br>OpenAI outsources FDE hiring spree<br>On Monday (11 May), OpenAI announced The OpenAI Deployment Company, a standalone entity funded by $4 billion of private equity from TPG, Advent, and others at a $14B valuation. It appears OpenAI is not an investor and holds a partner role.<br>The announcement mentions FDEs and says their job will be to “work closely with business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organizational infrastructure and critical workflows around it, and turn those gains into durable systems”.<br>Based on that, the FDEs will play an important role in OpenAI’s enterprise sales activity by ensuring the company’s AI systems work and deliver value for customers. Outsourcing this to the new Deployment Company should also free up OpenAI to focus on developing better AI models, while the partner company and its FDEs take care of the customer-facing side of things.<br>In a related development, OpenAI has acquired Tomoro, a UK-headquartered AI company founded in 2023, which employs 150 FDEs across the UK, Asia, and Australia. Tomoro is the first acquisition of the OpenAI Deployment Company.<br>Anthropic plans outsourced FDE recruitment<br>Anthropic is doing the same by creating its own distinct FDE consulting company. Last Monday (May 4), Anthropic issued an unusually hand-wavy announcement about the new business without a name and with few investment details mentioned.<br>Investors are Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, and the new business will work with “mid-sized companies across sectors to bring Claude into their most important operations.”<br>Anthropic’s approach seems to be the same as OpenAI’s: create a standalone company with external funding, in which FDEs integrate Claude into enterprises that will then presumably start purchasing more Claude tokens than ever.<br>FDE or a consultant?<br>These FDE roles seem very similar to those of an external consultant or a systems integrator. A year ago, I talked with FDEs at OpenAI and Ramp whose jobs seemed a genuine mix of platform engineering – with an FDE contributing back to the platform – software engineering, in that they built new solutions, and also solutions engineering: integrating into customers’ services.<br>The FDE role as I visualized it in mid-2025But today, it looks like the role is about to become indistinguishable from a solutions architect or consultant, especially given that these new FDE jobs are in quasi-external companies and separate organizations from where AI products are built.<br>The reality of the FDE role: an AI-focused solutions architect or consultantJob adverts are increasingly clear about the role, but it still helps to read between the lines. Here’s one for an FDE at Google Cloud. At first glance, it’s impressive (emphasis mine):<br>“You are an embedded builder who bridges the gap between frontier AI products and production-grade reality within customers. Unlike traditional advisory roles, you function as an “innovator-builder,” moving beyond high-level architecture to code, debug, and...