FDE is the job title of the moment, and no one seems to agree on what it means. @cursor_ai's Head of FDE, Pauline Brunet, has built FDE teams across 3 companies. Here's what she's learned about the role and who she's actually hiring to do the job.

FDE is becoming one of the hottest AI roles. Microsoft create a $2.5B Frontier Company, embedding 6,000 engineers and industry experts with customers. AWS followed with putting $1B into a Forward Deployed Engineering unit, seeded with “thousands” of FDEs. The signal is clear: The market wants engineers who can sit with customers, understand messy workflows, turn business pain into technical scope, ship production systems, and keep improving them after launch. The market wants more FDEs, a lot of them. So how do you learn to become an FDE? And if you apply for an FDE job, how should you prepare for the interviews? Recently I came across an FDE career roadmap created by It shows a clear visual learning path for roles like FDE. Instead of giving you another long course list, it maps the skills of the role: what topics matter, how they connect, and what to learn next. has 359K GitHub stars and 2.8M+ registered users. It is one of the most popular open-source learning projects for developers. Many developers already use it as a career map, study checklist, and interview prep guide. Hope this helps you landing your next dream AI job.

coining the founder FDE method. basically just live out of your design partners’ office. ship something, walk over, watch them use it, ship again. my feedback loop is like 30 min now instead of waiting a week for a slack reply.

“The attitude that makes FDEs unique is: the only thing that matters is the outcome.” Palantir Forward Deployed Engineers debut the Coffee Cup, an AIP-powered hackathon where candidates compete to run the best coffee shop — and get hired at Palantir.

TRM's forward deployed engineering (FDE) team ships mission-critical capabilities into classified networks and air-gapped enclaves — environments with no internet access, no external AI tools, and direct lines to real investigations. The team is now expanding into applied AI in these environments. Get an inside look at how the team operates and what it takes to thrive here 👉