How you can determine what the FDE job at Company X really entails.

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How you can determine what the FDE job at Company X really entails.<br>Forward-deployed engineering isn't one role. It's seven. Here's how to tell them apart.<br>Jul 01, 2026

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👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. I’ll be writing a little bit each week about what’s going on in the world of FDE. As always, would love to hear from you about how to make the newsletter more useful, and please do send along links or things I should be reading! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com.

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If you’re a job seeker looking for a step by step guide to what an FDE actually does, you’re going to be searching for a a while. "FDE" has gone from a Palantir-specific title to the most overloaded term in the valley.<br>Everyone is using it. And everyone seems to mean different things.<br>That said, there is hope! I’ve talked to dozens of companies running their version of the FDE playbook, and the roles all pretty much all fall into the same 7 categories. With just a few questions, you can figure out which category a company’s FDE role falls into.<br>Before we get into the details, here’s the summary in diagram form:

What various companies actually mean when the say FDE<br>Overall, our goal is to understand what a company means when they say “FDE”. You can get there with just 3 questions.<br>Question 1: Where in the sales cycle are you doing the work?

Lead gen and qualification generally don’t involve any FDE role, and instead tend to be sales or commercial roles.<br>The first thing to determine is where and at what stage are you doing work with a customer or potential customer. In vertical or horizontal “traditional” SaaS, there is always a step before the prospect signs the deal where you show how the customer could be successful using the platform.<br>How you show it usually depends on what what you’re selling, its price point, and the value it drives.<br>But in general you either show the value with A) a set of slides, or B) a demonstration of the software.<br>For most B2B customers, the demo resonates best if it’s custom-fit to the potential customer. Perhaps it shows the platform integrated with the customer’s existing source systems, or shows example data that replicates the kind of data that the customer usually works with.<br>In the AI era, it’s now possible (or even expected) to be able to show a lot of what the platform can do tailored to the specific customer requirements, use case, and problem statement, even if the customer knows that the problem is unique to their organization.<br>Question 2: How technically complex is the work?

The second parameter is around what’s actually being built.

The hierarchy of technical work that could be done by an FDE.<br>The least technically complex work is just talking or presenting the software in a nice way. A set of slides, or a spreadsheet showing a value calculation, or just providing a vocal narrative to the prospect or customer.<br>Since custom demos can often be built without any sort of underlying platform or product, those come next in the hierarchy (and perhaps can be “one shot” with AI directly today).<br>Assuming there is at least a primitive version of the software platform, next is configuration. Usually there’s a set of knobs that can be used to wire things up so that the platform is at least somewhat tailored to the customer. That often includes boolean flags to enable or disable certain capabilities or structured config files to set up the customer’s “schema” or “ontology”.<br>Then there’s a range of engineering work that could be done.<br>For example, someone on the team might write code to connect the platform to the existing customer systems. Often such “integration” work is boring and repetitive, but inevitable since every piece of business software has to connect to other business software in order to be valuable. Software companies all know that their product is merely one piece of a larger technical architecture for their customers.

Some platforms have an experience where the FDE is expected to write code or transformations in platform. The idea being that the software being deployed is flexible and itself can be modified with code to suit that particular customer’s needs. Often such code is written to build custom dashboards or visualizations or automations for the customer to use, and is expected to be “one off” work. Palantir, Databricks, Snowflake, and other “data platforms” fall into this category.

In the AI era, there is often work to train, build a set of evals, and provide human in the loop feedback to an ML model built to solve a specific problem. There’s been a whole host of AI startups where FDE is pretty much this job - the underlying platform is the same, but you have to build novel tooling to handle the customer’s data in a way that’s valuable.

Lastly, but certainly not least, there is the FDE job of building the platform in the field with the customer. In my opinion, this was...