Breaking into Forward Deployed Engineering
A Forward Deployed Engineer works inside a customer's environment rather than in their own company's codebase. You find out what the customer actually needs, scope the work, write the integration code, deploy it on infrastructure you do not control, prove with numbers that it worked, and take what you learned back to your own product team. AI companies are hiring for this role faster than for any other. The course covers three things, in this order. The first is the engineering. You build retrieval systems, agents, voice interfaces and full-stack AI products, then deploy them on hosted models and on open-weight models you run yourself. Every build ships with an evaluation set, guardrails and tracing, because a customer will not accept a system they cannot measure. The second is the customer work. You run discovery calls, scope and price an engagement, take a deployment through a security and procurement review, handle an incident without admin access, and hand the system over so it keeps running after you leave. The third is the hiring process. You learn which interview rounds FDE loops draw from, how seven named companies run their loops, and how the loop changes by seniority and by type of employer. You then practise each round with timed mocks and recorded reps that are scored against a rubric.