Forward Deployed Engineer is by no means a new role, but it’s having a moment right now. At a high level, it’s a really compelling mix of client-facing and technical work. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you get to embed with a company and help them solve real problems. Not “here’s how you can use our product”. It’s “I’m going to understand your specific pain points and goals, and we’re going to build a solution together”.
I’ve been going down a rabbit hole on open Forward Deployed Engineer roles for the past week, and I’ve come to an interesting conclusion: I don’t think anyone agrees on what this job actually is.
The obvious comparisons don’t quite work. It’s not just a solutions engineer who codes, and it’s not really professional services either. The more I dug in, the more it felt like everyone was using the same title to describe slightly different jobs.
If you zoom out, though, there is a useful way to think about how these roles differ.
Role | Primary job | Ownership | Feedback into product |
|---|---|---|---|
Solutions Engineer | Help customers use the product | Adoption | Limited |
Professional Services | Deliver a scoped solution | Project | Limited |
Forward Deployed Engineer | Make the solution actually work | Outcome | Expected |
The simplest way I’ve been thinking about it: solutions engineers help you use the product, consultants help you implement something specific, and FDEs are responsible for making the whole thing work when it doesn’t cleanly fit. That last part is where the role starts to feel meaningfully different.
Companies aren’t hiring Forward Deployed Engineers just to solve one-off customer problems. They’re trying to close a gap between what the product is designed to do and what customers can actually make work in their environment.
In more traditional products, that gap is smaller. You can rely on documentation, onboarding, and support. In AI and data-heavy systems, that gap is actually much wider.
These systems are powerful, but they’re not simple. They don’t plug cleanly into existing workflows, they depend heavily on the shape of your data, and they often require a fair amount of adaptation before they’re useful in a real environment.
If you’re an enterprise customer, that gap shows up quickly. You buy into the potential, but getting from “this is possible” to “this is actually working for us” can be overwhelming. That’s the gap these roles are trying to close.
So what ends up happening is that Forward Deployed Engineers don’t really get to stop at understanding the problem. They’re the ones responsible for making it work. That means getting into the details: how the customer’s systems actually operate, where the constraints are, what’s breaking, and what needs to exist that doesn’t today. Sometimes that’s writing production code. Other times it’s building integrations, shaping workflows, or stitching together systems in ways they weren’t originally designed for. Some Forward Deployed Engineers don’t have a background in traditional software engineering; they're in Product or Customer Success.
There’s a consulting element to it, but it’s not just advisory. You’re responsible for driving the solution all the way through to something that actually works in practice.
So now we have multiple elements at play: consultative, solutions-focused, product-minded, hands-on delivery, and influential. What this is telling me is that Forward Deployed Engineers are classically T-shaped: great if you’re into doing a lot of things, but challenging if you’re looking for your next role. It feels a lot like reaching your hand into a jar filled with folded sheets of paper, and the sheets you grab are the skills you’ll need for one specific company.
This one's for paying subscribers.
Modern Leader has three ways to go deeper — Leadership Lab, All Access, and Inner Circle. This piece is part of one of them.
See membership options