Roundup: Andy on being an FDE, Greg Isenberg on the FDE role, AI Engineering Field Guide, and more.
A biweekly roundup of everything forward deployed around the tech world. FDE work in low margin businesses, and growth in github contributions from vibe coding.
👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. I write a bit about what’s going on in the world of FDE. As always, would love to hear from you about how to make the newsletter more useful, and please do send along things I should be reading! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com.
Favorite resources from the last two weeks:
I enjoyed this post by Andy. Not enough is written about the motivation for why the FDE model works well. A large part of it is that you want the person building the system as close as possible to the person using it. As Andy says:
By “land” I mean things are never only internal to certain humans, customers, sales people, teammates, or in a database somewhere. The work is literally to propagate behavior change via relationships and conversations that catalyze not only your company to do things differently, but my company too, on the other end…it's useful on an individual level to really be careful and thoughtful when reducing the distance between my mind and yours.
Alexey as part of the AI engineering field guide writes that “Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is one of the fastest-growing titles in our AI engineering job data. We found 28 live FDE listings in February 2026 and 118 in July, a 4.2x increase in less than six months.”
More interesting than the specific analysis (it’s obviously not comprehensive) is that he’s uploaded all the data, including where it was scraped from, and the analysis in a ipython notebook as part of the repo. I enjoyed cloning the repo and poking around to see what other cool analyses could be done. You can look at common frontend frameworks folks are using, or which locations for work are trending up.
In some ways this is starting to look like the future - you can vibe code something and then share it with the world, but sometimes rather than sharing the “app” or the “website” you just share the code and data directly. Github seems to confirm that total contributions is dramatically accelerating. I’m very curious to see the 2026 data.
The folks at Varick have been doing some particularly interesting content recently, including an appearance on Greg’s podcast, which was quite good if a bit too much of a presentation rather than a conversation, and then this excellent write up by Daniel who leads FDE there.
The most thought provoking point for me was around how certain types of businesses (in Daniel’s argument, low margin businesses) are actually structurally set up really well to fundamentally change in the AI revolution, because cost reduction with automation directly translates to doubling or even tripling profits. High margin businesses usually can’t multiply their profits as directly, no matter how much they automate.
It made me even more excited about the spaces I’m really passionate about (which happen to be very cost heavy even if not necessarily low margin - healthcare / life sciences) but also seemed to indicate there may be a huge opportunity in places with lots of admin overhead. USG for example. DOGE may not have been such a bad idea…
Favorite FDEverything roles from the last two weeks:
Eric is hiring for an FDE at ConductorAI. Conductor runs a platform that helps government organizations run AI agent-driven workflows. (DC) Apply here.
They also have my favorite flavor of job posting, which I’m surprised I don’t see more of in today’s world of rapid acquihires, a role where you can apply with someone else!Shannon at Foxtrot is hiring for a forward deployed engineer. Foxtrot is one of several excellent Palantir consulting shops run by Palantir alums, and many of my friends work with them. (US, EU remote). Apply here.
Dylan at Figma is hiring for an FDE. That’s right - Figma! Apparently Figma is building workflows with enterprise - “you’ll work hands-on with customers adopting emerging Figma developer workflows, starting with Make Local, to understand their technical environments, unblock implementation, and translate real-world deployment patterns into product and engineering insights.” (SF, NYC). Apply here.
Jake at Serval is hiring for a Head of Deployment. Serval is a unified help desk, access management, and automation platform with a built-in AI agent workforce. (SF). Apply here.
Looking to get hired?
Our friends over at Nextplay are running a white-glove service to make intros and get you the perfect role. If you’re interested, please fill out the form here.
Notes:
Thanks for reading! Email sanjay@fdeverything.com with any ideas / feedback / suggestions / important content I’ve left out!
If you found this helpful, respond with a thumbs up. Or ping me with a quick reply! I respond to every email and my love of the game is unquenchable, though sometimes my calendar books up quickly.
I’m going to start doing a few interviews with rockstar FDEs and FDE leaders. If there’s someone you want to hear from, let me know!