👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. Every week, I share interesting content, news, and job postings from the world of FDE. Would love to hear from you if you have ideas about how to make the newsletter more useful, or if you think there’s something I should be reading that I missed! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com with any thoughts - I reply to every single email.
Writing & videos:
Infinite Loop did a written interview with Thomas Baucom, who works as an FDE at Superhuman. He talks about how the FDE role actually works there and what he does for customers. (As one example of a recent project, he used AI to turn a multinational publisher’s massive style guide into a series of custom agents that flag errors for writers to review as they work.) Good practical examples of FDE work and some thoughts about why he thinks FDEs work in-person.
Exponent published a mock FDE interview on YouTube with Kamesh Vedula, a senior FDE at Rippling. Worth a look if you’re unsure about interviewing for forward-deployed engineering jobs (or are new to it, or have been unsuccessful).
What’s the difference between FDEs and sales engineers? This is an hour-long video from Barry McCardel, who founded Hex and previously worked as an FDE at Palantir. Good person to listen to and knows a lot about this stuff. Helpful if you’re trying to answer: what really is an FDE? I used to report to Barry when I was a young warthog at Palantir. He was great!
One of Notion’s FDEs, Kazuki Hayakawa, wrote an essay on Substack about ‘deployment-as-an-outcome’. Its core idea is that instead of selling FDE hours or consulting capacity, companies can (and should!) combine AI agents and human engineers and charge for very specific outcomes. (Kazuki analyzes Genera as one example of this working in the field.)
There’s some interesting new research from the firm Christian & Timbers that backs up the whole discourse about AI deployment being a huge bottleneck. The basic tl;dr is that companies need more FDEs, and even the 700% rise in FDE job postings between this year and last year isn’t really an indication of the ceiling here. Companies want more FDEs!
Ethan Ding wrote a very stream-of-consciousness essay about what Palantir actually does. It’s mostly about Palantir, but by nature that means it’s also about FDEs and what they do.
Interesting news:
9fin is expanding the FDE role by hiring what they call ‘forward deployed investors’ and ‘forward deployed bankers’. Maybe we’re headed towards… FDEverything? :)
OpenAI deployment is going global and they’re hiring for a bunch of FDE roles all over the world. There’s more context on this in this essay (but fair warning, a big chunk of it is paid).
Fanduel extended its Geocomply deal to further embed Geocomply FDEs alongside product/ops.
My favorite FDE jobs this week:
baseten is looking for forward-deployed engineers in SF and NYC. Apply here.
Cohere posted a ton of FDE and FDE-related roles all around the world. Apply here.
MongoDB is hiring a lead FDE in New York City. Apply here.
Exa has new roles open in London, California, and New York City. Apply here.
ElevenLabs also posted a slew of FDE roles all over the world. Apply here.
Anthropic just posted a role in Munich (more in SF, NYC, Paris, London). Apply here.
David George is hiring for his team at Databricks. Apply here.
Notes:
I hope you have a great week!
Soon I’ll be interviewing great FDEs and FDE leaders; if you know someone you think I should talk to, let me know at sanjay@fdeverything.com - would be much appreciated.
You can also email me with any feedback or suggestions you have.
Are you aware of any companies doing really great FDE work that the world should hear about in a longer-form essay/deep dive? Tell me about it if so :)
See you next week,
- Sanjay