š Hey there - Iām Sanjay. Every week, I share what I think is the most useful writing, data, and commentary 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 thereās 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.
Interesting writing, news & videos:
Wonderful raised $550M at a $5B valuation, more than double their valuation just six months ago. Embedded delivery is basically their whole playbook (engineering teams on customer premises in more than 35 countries) and part of the raise is specifically for expanding its FDE teams. Investors pricing the FDE motion, in other words.
Ansel Erol, an FDE at Baseten, announced PACT, a benchmark that he and Mika Okamoto designed. They use it to determine how well enterprise AI assistants keep following workplace rules when breaking them is convenient. Itās a very FDE-aligned benchmark (whether an agent follows rules is the kind of thing customers ask!).
This interview with Natalie Meurer, who is the Head of Agent Engineering at Sierra, is worth reading if you havenāt taken a look. She talks about how she thinks the FDE role is evolving and sort of merging with product engineering. āIf you are a product engineer, you should be talking to customers. If you are a forward-deployed engineer, you should be building the product.ā She goes into some other topics too, e.g. that she thinks generalists will become more valuable.
Vinoo Ganesh, the CEO at Kepler, wrote a great guide to FDE for Next Play back in February. Still well worth a read especially if youāre in the camp of ānot an FDE yet but considering itā. Lots of practical, useful advice and wisdom here.
ServiceNow (via Miku Jha) announced that theyāre folding their research org into their FDE org. The stated rationale is that the research to product to field pipeline loses too much signal, so itās best for research to have direct contact with customer deployments from day one. More of the trend weāre seeing where companies merge roles (or departments) into one broad, vague-ish FDE department. And probably contributing to a lot of the āwhat even is an FDE anymoreā discourse!
My favorite new FDE jobs this week:
Parallel (web infra for AI agents) is hiring a lead FDE in NYC. Apply here.
Enterpret (customer intelligence infra) is also hiring a lead FDE role in NYC. Apply here.
Lovable (vibe coding platform) is hiring a lead FDE in Stockholm. Apply here.
Livekit (agent framework/platform) is hiring lots more FDEs remotely. Apply here.
Retell (voice AI) posted an FDE role specifically for new grads. Apply here.
Paradigm (spreadsheets) is hiring what they call a āDeployed Engineerā. Apply here.
There are still lots of new FDE roles opening up at Replit. Apply here. Apply here.
Notes:
Happy Labor Day. I hope you have a great week :)
Soon Iāll 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