Roundup: Nominal co-founder, Andrew Ng talks about FDE, OpenAI and Anthropic launch AI services companies
A biweekly roundup of everything forward deployed around the tech world. FDE jobs up 5x over the last 2 years, and Pragmatic Engineer features the FDE role.
👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. I’ll be writing a little bit each week 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 links or things I should be reading! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com.
Favorite resources from the week:
FDE job postings are up 5x in the last 2 years. Of course, this might as well be a 100x - the reality is that the job got incredibly popular almost overnight, and before that there were only a few companies that were doing it. Many folks have changed their existing job titles too. One thing I’ve noticed is that now you have to do a lot of investigation to figure out which flavor of FDE people mean now.
South Park Commons hosted a talk about FDE which had a few folks, including Nominal co-founder and the head of FDE at OpenAI. Pay particular attention to how they define the FDE role, and how AI assisted coding has changed the job.
A veteran Palantir FDE talked about how product development happened while Palantir Foundry was being created in the late 2010s. Anjor is excellent, and has a great blog where he’s been writing more about the art of FDE.
Andrew Ng (cofounder of Coursera) blogged about FDE and the future of AI engineering. Interestingly, Andrew’s take is that the demand for AI engineers will be even larger than the demand for FDEs:
However, I believe the number of AI Engineer jobs will be far larger. A company might accept a few FDEs to be embedded within its organization. But most companies will want far more of their own employees working on their projects.
OpenAI launched DeployCo and Anthropic launched a new AI services company. In both cases, it’s been interesting to see how the foundation labs are building their FDE teams, both internal to the company and by investing / incubating / spinning up their own separate services companies. Clearly the word is out, and the labs want a piece of the action. I’d recommend poking around at the team structures and the people involved - for example OpenAI bootstrapped the DeployCo team by acquiring Tomoro, which seems to be mostly ex-Accenture folks.
Gergely of the Pragmatic Engineering blog wrote about FDE, including about the trend he’s seeing where FDE has become more consulting / solutions architect like, especially as the labs spin up services companies to go after the outrageous market demand. See his visual here:
Favorite FDEverything roles from the week:
Jason is hiring for Deployment Systems Engineer at Nominal. Nominal makes software for industrial and hardware data. They’re growing rapidly and have customers making really cool stuff - my favorite is this plane. (NYC, LA, Austin) Apply here.
Doug is hiring for an FDE manager at Candid Health. Candid is building the Stripe for medical billing. (NYC, SF) Apply here.
Erik is hiring for a forward deployed ML engineer at Modal. Modal provides infrastructure that lets you run inference, training, and scaling of AI models. (NYC, SF) Apply here.
Marina is hiring for an FDE Gen AI at Scale AI. Scale’s an interesting company - they started with data labelling, and now do all sorts of work building verifiable and reliable AI systems. The team is growing quickly as part of the Meta umbrella. (SF, NYC) Apply here.
Arjun is hiring for an AI Strategist at Distyl AI. Distyl deploys AI-native automation that enables enterprises to change how they work, including in industries as disparate as telecom, finance, and hardware. (London, SF, NYC) Apply 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. You’d be surprised how often writing a newsletter feels like shouting into the abyss. And as always would appreciate forwarding to a friend who could find this useful.