We spoke to founders and operators who’ve hired (and been) FDEs to find out what it takes to build the model at your company.
So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer: How to Know If You Need One and How to Get the Role Right
Once written off as a glorified consultant, the forward deployed engineer is now the hottest gig at AI startups.
The FDE was originally conceived by Palantir to wrangle value out of a non-prescriptive product. The title is descriptive: Palantir FDEs spent most of their time literally deployed with customers, and were still very much engineers, writing and debugging production code for some incredibly niche use cases, from government to supply chain to energy.
Now as AI products collide with the reality of legacy systems and thorny codebases, founders have turned to the forward deployed model to send engineers onsite to help speed the time to value for enterprise customers.
But what’s missing from the FDE hype cycle — no doubt also buoyed by Palantir’s outlier success in recent years — is that the role isn’t one-size-fits-all for every AI startup. It takes a ton of intentional design to actually get a return on investment.
“Forward deployed engineering is being framed as a panacea right now. But it’s a lot more complicated than that,” says James Honsa, who previously built and scaled Ironclad’s equivalent of an FDE team, called “legal engineering.” “There are times in a company's lifecycle where it makes sense, and there are customer segments where it makes sense, but it's a pretty blunt instrument to try to use for your entire business.”
We sat down with founders who’ve hired FDEs and former Palantir FDEs and recruiters to break down what justifies adding forward deployed headcount, and how to find the right folks for the job.
Our panel covers:
- Where FDEs add value, from uncovering obscure but meaty product opportunities to scaling scrappy CTO energy
- A diagnostic to figure out if you actually need an FDE, or just want a traditional engineer or post-sales hire who can talk to customers
- The traits all stellar FDEs have in common
- How to scope the role for success and choose which customers to deploy to
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors