FDE

We've covered what an FDE is and what the job actually looks like day to day. The natural next question: should you want this job — and if so, how do you actually get it? The honest fit test FDE work rewards a specific temperament, and it's worth being honest about whether it's yours before you chase it for the salary alone (and the salary is real: average total comp is now reportedly around $238K, with a range from roughly $205K to $486K, and senior FDEs at frontier labs goi

In the last post, we built up the idea of a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) from first principles: an engineer who sits with the customer and ships the code, collapsing the usual gap between "understanding the problem" and "building the solution." That's the theory. What does it actually look like on a Tuesday? The traditional software engineer's day Picture a typical SWE at a product company. Their day is structured around internal development: a standup, some deep-focus tim

If you've browsed tech job boards recently, you've probably noticed a title popping up everywhere: Forward Deployed Engineer. Palantir, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Databricks — all hiring for it, some by the dozens. Anthropic even set up a joint venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs just to embed these engineers inside financial firms. So what actually is this job, and why does it suddenly matter so much? Let's build it up from scratch. The problem: some software can't jus