If your forward deployed engineers write every customer solution from scratch, you don't have an FDE function, you have a dev shop. That distinction runs through "Forward Deployed Engineering 101", @zkevinbai's talk on @aiDotEngineer's YouTube. Kevin is a member of technical staff at Anthropic, was the first person on Rippling's FDE team (grown to about 25 in a year), and did a stint at Palantir before that. The talk gives you a way to decide whether your company actually needs this role, and what has to be true before it works. - The role fits exactly one quadrant. Sort by what you sell and who buys it. FDE is for the odd case where something very technical has to be sold to a non-technical buyer. Sell a Datadog to CTOs and engineers absorb the complexity themselves. Sell a configurable tool to a non-technical buyer and that's fine too. - The customer isn't buying software or hours. They're buying an outcome. A CPG leader cares about shelf placement and sales throughput, not how the data got organized. - The numbers Kevin cites for the model. Measured by average contract value among public SaaS companies in the Fortune 500, Palantir is first at around $4M, ServiceNow next at $1.2M, Workday at $600K, and no other public SaaS company cracks half a million. - It's a design partnership run at enterprise scale. Startups already do this to find product market fit. Palantir's assertion was that nothing restricts it to the early days. - No platform, no FDE program. FDEs assemble solutions from shared primitives, never from nothing. Kevin uses AWS as the familiar version: DynamoDB exists so you don't invent a database. - Two questions before you hire anyone. Do I need this, not want it. And do I have a platform, or am I willing to fund building one. - Bespoke stays bespoke, generalizable moves into the platform. Deployment work doubles as scouting for what the product should absorb next. - Why the model is spreading now. Nearly every platform is agentic, which makes nearly every platform customizable, which means your customers often have no idea what your product does. - The profile, in one line. An FDE is a customer-facing software engineer. Someone you'd hire onto the team, and trust in front of a customer. I'm working through the published talks from AI Engineer World's Fair sharing summaries and takeaways. Follow for more!