The modern FDE role is closer to being a founder than being a consultant. A traditional consultant will diagnose the workflow, a solutions engineer will explain the architecture, and a software engineer will build a feature based on requirements. But the FDE has to do all of that while the requirements are still moving. They have to figure out which problem matters, sell the customer on a concrete path, build the first version, notice what breaks, explain the tradeoffs, and decide which parts of the work should become reusable. That is much closer to founder work than traditional delivery work. It rewards the person who can understand an ambiguous business problem, choose a path, build the first version, explain the tradeoffs, and keep moving while the requirements change constantly. In the age of AI, one person can now handle the full loop themselves, understanding the workflow, prototyping the system, testing it with users, and turning the result into the next version without waiting for a large team or internal beurocracy. That's why the FDE is becoming one of the more interesting roles in tech. It is generalist because the work itself crosses product, engineering, sales, strategy, and operations. If this kind of work sounds exciting, Tenex is hiring: