So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer: How to Know If You Need One and How to Get the Role Right

Founders and operators who’ve successfully built forward deployed engineering teams share the nuances that make this idiosyncratic role work, along with advice for hiring your own team.

Where forward deployed engineers add value

The FDE nowadays can get lumped in with an implementation role — but that’s drifted from its Palantir origins, says alum Shilpa Balaji. "Deeply understanding your customer and executing for them through product implementation or configuration is important, but that’s not forward deployed engineering. The FDE model requires making room for creativity and innovation. It’s about discovering new things in a customer context and decentralizing product development,” she says.

Serval co-founder Jake Stauch agrees that FDEs are much more than implementation leads. “The way I see an FDE is as an actual member of the software engineering team. Don’t just force them into implementation. Let them build the software, because they’re the ones talking to customers all day,” he says. “FDEs actually make the product better and more attractive to our ICP, while still reducing friction in the implementation process.”

A Palantir FDE’s charter might be to work alongside a manufacturing customer to reduce the number of defective products coming off of the assembly line, or to deploy software to help a government administer supplies for natural disaster relief. At Serval, for example, which is building an AI ITSM, FDEs have shipped a lot of real product inspired by time spent on the ground with enterprise customers: They’ve built over 60 third-party app integrations, a feedback system for users to rate agent performance and an SLA system within the product.

The most impactful use cases for FDEs typically fall into these buckets, across both product and business.

Push a big deal over the line

Pulling FDEs into the sales process can help close VIP contracts. That’s exactly what Looker did: They’d set up prospects with a free trial, along with heavy pre-sales implementation efforts using their actual data in demos.

“We thought we were deciding between product and service, but not deciding unlocked a third way: Selling as a product and forward-deploying during the free trial so it felt like a customized service,” co-founder Lloyd Tabb told us. “When selling the product, we used the demo as a chance to build a proof of concept, so we didn’t have a dummy sales pitch version — we always asked the prospect for an actual dataset to play with. Then, if we could get our prospects to use the product as much as possible in the free trial, we could comfortably ask for money later.”

Shilpa Balaji shares a similar story from her Palantir days. “We had three or four forward deployed engineers working with a customer in the energy space who just totally hand-rolled something to win the business, to fit the specific problem space, to create something of real value,” she says. “And they weren’t thinking at all about what the roadmap was, or if they had agreement from the mothership. The directive is just build the product, generate value.”

Find obscure but meaty product opportunities by embedding with customers

The “deployed” nature of the role leads to deeper insights that are hard to come by on a 30-minute Zoom customer discovery call. Balaji says FDEs should ultimately be creative problem solvers in the field — who can think without roadmap constraints.

“Living onsite with the customer is such a core part of being an FDE. You're not just setting up a user interview. You're embedding with them. You're prototyping what you hear one day and showing them something the next day,” she says.

That extended immersion is what leads to the most interesting product use cases. “What’s really powerful about an FDE model is that they can be creative. FDEs invent something not by synthesizing it with a broader product, or reprioritizing a roadmap. They’re so scrappily tied to a customer and their problem that they don’t even think about what ‘product’ is,” says Balaji. “Some of the most successful FDE stories from my time at Palantir had nothing to do with the core product offering.”

Scale scrappy CTO energy

Another benefit Stauch has found from building out an FDE team is that it recreates the early days of a co-founder single-handedly shipping code for customers.

At Serval, the difference between an FDE and a standard engineer is small: FDEs are expected to spend around 20% of their time with customers, and they’re focused on building product capabilities, and not infra, Stauch says.

“If your forward deployed engineers are the best engineers on your team, you’re reproducing the early co-founder energy where your CTO hears feedback directly from the customer and immediately fixes it and makes the product better. FDEs are a way to scale that,” says Stauch.

The FDE model runs much faster than the traditional feedback-to-product cycle because it removes the “middlemen.” “In any company, you have solutions engineers, customer success staff, account execs. Maybe the solutions engineer hears a good idea and they communicate it to a product manager. The product manager talks to the engineering manager, and then it gets scheduled in a sprint in the quarterly plan,” he says. “But there’s this gap between a customer saying, ‘I wish it worked this way,’ to the problem being addressed. That can take months, even at a great company. So it’s much better if an engineer hears that feedback directly, then goes back to their desk and builds it.”

Clean out the feature garage

The tighter feedback loop that leads to increased shipping velocity allows FDEs to build lower-priority but still impactful features that might otherwise get stuck in roadmap purgatory.

Before founding Serval, Stauch was Product Lead at physical security platform Verkada. The sales team had a Slack channel called “Feature Garage,” where they’d dump customer feature requests that, largely, went untouched. But Stauch says that with an FDE model, engineers can action on these requests — not by building the exact features, but by addressing the deeper need.

“Forward deployed has a huge role in driving progress on non-controversial product capabilities. No one needs to have a brainstorming session or a roadmap around when to slot that in. They can just go and build it,” he says.

Take this diagnostic before adding forward deployed headcount

While these benefits would entice any founder, FDE dreams can be misguided if a few key business ingredients are missing. “I think when folks today are looking to build out FDE teams, a lot of what they're looking for is just stronger customer signal and faster iteration. But you don’t need a whole fleet of FDEs to do those things,” points out Shilpa Balaji.

Investing in an FDE team, especially in the earliest stages of a startup, is a costly bet — and can quickly burn a lot of cash if the math doesn’t add up.

Frank Bien was tasked with scaling Looker’s scrappy sales motion when he stepped in as CEO. “When I joined, there were still a lot of unknowns. Should we sell for $500 a month or $5,000?” Bien told us. “It was all up in the air — and there were no spreadsheets or slide decks to be found. In my mind, it was similar to Marketo’s model, meaning it wasn’t going to be just a couple hundred bucks a month. We needed to be in the neighborhood of $25,000 a year per customer.”

Validating there’d be a healthy return made Bien confident to invest in an FDE model in the early days. “After crunching the numbers, we saw that by the time we had 2,000 customers, we could be doing $100 million dollars in ARR, and on the path to going public. That was the model from 2013 on,” says Bien.

Hiring the right forward deployed engineer

So you’ve sorted out that an FDE does make sense for your startup. How do you find the best person for the job?

You don’t necessarily need to start by scouting someone who’s already been an FDE. “There are many different versions of forward deployed engineers today. An FDE at Palantir can look very different from an FDE at an early-stage startup. So founders shouldn’t optimize for the title alone — it’s worth taking the time to understand how the role is actually structured at that company, and asking candidates what their day-to-day work really looks like,” says Siu.

In some cases, titles and pedigree can even be an anti-signal. The most stellar FDEs our panel has worked with all had these five qualities in common.

Look for these five traits

1. They don’t bring in a playbook (and are often early in their career). At Palantir, recent college grads made up a bulk of the FDE roster.
2. They’re gritty. Balaji says grit is probably the hallmark quality of the best FDEs she worked with at Palantir.
3. They clear a high technical bar.“Engineer” is still an essential part of the job title.
4. They don’t stop shipping.“The best FDEs I worked with were compulsive builders,” says Balaji.
5. They’re deeply curious about how businesses work.“FDEs are innately curious about businesses,” says Honsa.

Interview for raw problem-solving ability (but don’t skip the coding test)

Shilpa Balaji says Palantir diverged from the classic big tech coding interview. Instead, Palantir oriented FDE interviews around the real technical challenges the company was trying to solve for their customers.

Scoping the role

Once you’ve embarked on hiring your first FDEs, lean on these three tactics to set up the role for impact — for both the FDEs themselves and your business.

1. Reserve FDEs for your biggest customers’ hardest problems.
2. FDEs do their best work when they’re onsite.
3. Embrace scope creep, but be wary of throwing human labor at a product problem.