This term is so eye rolling. Unless the FDE has legitimized pull within the core product team they are nothing more than a glorified field engineer/technical consultant.
My understanding is Palantir used the term, and calling teams of them "Delta Force" to make a consultative-and-service-heavy software adoption cycle make sense to US Military clients.
They used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.
This is useful context, but given that you're saying "delta" was in use over a decade ago and that you don't have any firsthand knowledge in the time since, it seems at least a little presumptuous to confidently asset that people didn't start colloquially saying "force" afterwards.
I was incredibly surprised to find what I thought was a Site Reliability Engineer role was actually... forward deployment as a Sales Recovery Engineer, or a consultant with less freedom/comp. negotiation power and extra work.
In fewer words: people want you to think so, but not really.
>FDEs are sometimes mistakenly thought of as consultants, but the difference between consultants and FDEs is that the former make one-off recommendations, whereas FDEs generally work with customers, long-term.
The funny thing is I’ve worked at/worked with a ton of big tech companies (including FAANGs) where the most tenured people on some teams are external consultants.
Id say the main difference is FDEs post-engagement need to drive product strategy back into the platform (non trivial ask)
you typically see FDE-driven companies' products be 'assembly' driven and very deep into integration, as they figure out the optimal primitives that assemble into the shapes required to solve new customer problems
TL;DR: Glorified contract role for integrating your employer's APIs with enterprise customers. Like working with mckinsey vibe PMs and being sold on fat margins you'll see none of? Perfect!
I remember interviewing at Palantir back when they were making this role popular (probably a decade ago). I wanted to be an SDE and the recruiter kept pushing me towards this “forward deployed engineer” role. After hearing the pitch I went…oh so you want me to be a sales consultant? They did not take this well, I guess because Palantir was trying very hard to convince the world they were a tech unicorn and not a glorified consulting firm.
Orwellian speak for ... you won't get paid like our base engineers and when we want to get rid of you, we send you to our Siberian customer because you are a forward deployed engineer haha
Still i want to believe i'm wrong and it's a good job.
Yeah, I'm reading this and find myself wondering what's so new about this. Haven't tech companies always had this role? I suppose Forward Deployed Engineer sounds more like an engineering role than Sales Consultant, which sounds like you're a salesman rather than an engineer, so it feels to me like this is mostly PR to make the role more attractive to engineers.
The FDE is really the consolidation of two existing roles: solutions architect and engineer.
In the old days, sales would close a client with the help of someone in technical sales and a solutions architect that would come up with a high level spec for a solution. That spec would be fleshed out post sales and then given to an engineer to develop.
Today the FDE often does both.
The difference between Palantir and pure consulting is that Palantir has a core software platform that they customize per client. The business model is more akin to IBM or SAP products.
This is the *intended* difference. As with all of these new terms, it's quickly becoming co-opted and winds up being the case that most companies using it treat it no different than the old term.
I'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are highly risk averse. It's one of the few careers I get a bit jealous of, even though the burnout rate is probably pretty high.
I agree that the idea is cool, but from what I've heard from people in the role at most companies it's essentially a solutions architect role by another name.
Funny enough, the Pragmatic Engineer (author of the post linked) had a follow up from about a year after the post above and he reports the same thing.
If I did that to the best of my ability, I’d want to be a boss and not a chump. The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree. These are important questions for the EV calculation
As a professed "hacker tourist" I've been rewarded with the trust and respect not to set myself or my coworkers on fire, in cultures which didn't see a lot of outsiders. Several times I've threatened to quit within the first month if things didn't change; one time I walked in the door, turned around and walked out. Once I paid for my own plane ticket for the interview, and didn't come home to visit for two months (worked there for six). Pay has been ok, but not stellar. Duration has been three to nine months. (I've been a licensed business since 1984.)
I basically did this for a couple years around 33. I was the highest paid IC for a multi billion dollar "digital transformation". I was writing code in 5+ languages, doing hardware retrofits, had r/w access to every system, climbing ladders to deploy hardware for my own skunkworks projects.
The whole thing was crazy. I mean actually insane. I look at my productivity from the time period and it blows me away.
Really enjoyed it. Being the one guy who was damned adamant I wouldn't manage anyone kept me out of the political fray as well. I drank and I knew things. I probably had more freedom and access than anyone ever has had at a company that size.
Is it good for a company to have those roles or not? I don't know, after starting several companies and also working in corporate, that was the most fun I think I've had. Moving the needle, unfucking things, reducing complexity.
Providing accountability where there was none before.
I left because they wanted to me to move. I was flown out every Monday and flew back every Friday but I didn't want to move cities and I had a startup I wanted to launch. I took 3 months traveling and then 2 months writing code for my 4th startup.
There are _almost_ no universal rules, my work saved them an insane amount of money and generated even more, but the methods only made sense to dig them out of the completely unaccountable traffic jam they had built for themselves.
I’ve done some of what I think this is, working on prem with customers, and I find it funny when I see jobs for FDEs that are somehow all in-office in San Francisco. The whole idea of being forward deployed I take to mean actually deployed.
I've done this too, just not under the official FDE title. I've never wanted to end it all so badly before. I felt like a tutor for a bunch of man-babies, who was stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque loop. Heavy breath of relief when the contract ended.
to put it in simple terms, these are people who are so good at both usage/integration of the entire product and can help the company's clients to integrate the product seamlessly into their stack. We've seen this in rise, especially OpenAI engineers having office hours inside Nvidia's campus, etc.
Every company I have seen implements more or less the exact same stack, with a few small variations. The problem is that it is often not very good and is usually months, if not years, behind. I have already seen this in several places, including a few F250 companies.
Frankly, it is a waste of time. It is expensive to build, expensive to maintain going forward, and often already dated by the time it is finished because things have moved on.
Also, as much as I like code, and would personally prefer to build things in code, a lot of internal innovation happens because end users have access to agentic tools. Yet, from the outset, both OpenAI and Anthropic FDE approaches seem heavily code-driven. I might be mistaken.
In my opinion, it is much better to deploy a more customisable harness that sits across the different technology stacks that is also user-friendly. But then I am biased, because that is what we do, so take this comment as you will.
These used to be called "Sales Engineers" but Palantir wanted something more militant sounding. It's a shame others picked this gross term up and started using it.
Sales engineers are pre-sale, FDE are both pre- and post-sale. FDEs are also much more involved in the client implementation, often they are the ones actually doing all the work, specially in government bureaucracies or large ossified corporations where no one there actually knows how to get things done.
Palantir is also the kind of business where every engagement is somewhat to totally bespoke. That's a big departure from a more typical SaaS model where you focus on providing a platform that your customers build on top of with a more generic set of tools.
I am curious whether this FDE direction will result in more product and platform complexity that is more difficult to unwind.
As building becomes more and more easier, the value of pure swe goes down. I feel the only way to thrive in this environment is either a specialized engineer or a fde.
your FDEs shape your product strategy, and should be considered R&D. after making sure a customer deployment is successful (by any means necessary btw, even if it means building new systems outside of the product), the crucial next step is to drive the product improvement with PMs and core software engineers after contact with reality. this was a pretty radical idea from palantir in the era of saas
if you only do step 1 you're basically just solutions engineers / mckinsey, and if you only do step 2 with no customer learning to your product you don't improve your platform for all the other customers. the pain becomes the moat
There's a reason why this echelon of companies comp FDEs much, much more than services businesses is because you're trying to find engineering + product + customer facing in one (knew people making 200k+ 5 years ago as new grad FDEs, and the same flavour at the labs is 500k+ easy)
that being said the role has evolved a lot over the years, and depending on the company it could be indistinguishable from solutions eng, or sales eng, or even dev rel. I do recommend people on HN work at one of the elite FDE shops first before commenting though!
I put something similar another comment. What you describe is a tough job that requires dedication and the ability to objectively differentiate yourself through your work across multiple disciplines. I’ll copy it here:
“The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree”
I worked at a technical consultant out of college and it was a lot of the first category but often my small team did step 2. Yet it was never promoted by the larger corporate hierarchy because the incentives were not there. I would love to a job like this because I’m so nerdy but also charismatic and have perspective. Knowing myself and how dedicated I would be, I wouldn’t take anything less than 250kz
In the semiconductor industry this role is called Field Application Engineer. They do serious work, not just slideware, as your chip probably ships with drivers that were designed months or years before you could get significant time from the customers engineers (which generally only happens after you manufacture, but you need software to prove it works well before that). So these guys are the ones who adapt it, and their feedback is valuable as they are the ones who build understanding of the customer.
However, at my old employer they didn't get commit rights to the main software repos. They had to carry around a bunch of patches which were gradually cleaned up and integrated. As I didn't directly work with them, I don't know if this says more about them or the guys managing the internal development.
It’s just a field engineer but with a more military-sounding name in order to attract the worst bros. A job that has existed since the 60s in computing and likely long before that
Tech is becoming from a margins heaven to the worst of all worlds. Super high capex (like manufacturing) in addition to headcount requirements for each additional customer (like consulting).
In the classic FDE model palantir pioneered, one of the main features was that you would use your learnings from one customer and integrate that back into your in house product, so that similar customers are serviced for cheaper later on.
With AI coding agents FDEs are now everywhere. One because they can demand a higher salary due to simply doing more due to AI. And two, because AI really accelerates the whole bespoke solution implementation thing. However, from what I hear, none of the actual "integrate that back into your in house platform" stuff is actually happening. So it's a tiny bit of a farce.
66 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadThey used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.
In fewer words: people want you to think so, but not really.
...sounds like a consultant to me!
Also, even if "long-term" was an important distinction, the term FDE itself became popular a very short time ago!!! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f... so how can you assert FDEs work with customers for the long-term
you typically see FDE-driven companies' products be 'assembly' driven and very deep into integration, as they figure out the optimal primitives that assemble into the shapes required to solve new customer problems
If you are forward deployed then you get deployed forward (away from comfortable home office).
Still i want to believe i'm wrong and it's a good job.
In the old days, sales would close a client with the help of someone in technical sales and a solutions architect that would come up with a high level spec for a solution. That spec would be fleshed out post sales and then given to an engineer to develop.
Today the FDE often does both.
The difference between Palantir and pure consulting is that Palantir has a core software platform that they customize per client. The business model is more akin to IBM or SAP products.
Funny enough, the Pragmatic Engineer (author of the post linked) had a follow up from about a year after the post above and he reports the same thing.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-forward-deploye...
The whole thing was crazy. I mean actually insane. I look at my productivity from the time period and it blows me away.
Really enjoyed it. Being the one guy who was damned adamant I wouldn't manage anyone kept me out of the political fray as well. I drank and I knew things. I probably had more freedom and access than anyone ever has had at a company that size.
Is it good for a company to have those roles or not? I don't know, after starting several companies and also working in corporate, that was the most fun I think I've had. Moving the needle, unfucking things, reducing complexity.
Providing accountability where there was none before.
I left because they wanted to me to move. I was flown out every Monday and flew back every Friday but I didn't want to move cities and I had a startup I wanted to launch. I took 3 months traveling and then 2 months writing code for my 4th startup.
There are _almost_ no universal rules, my work saved them an insane amount of money and generated even more, but the methods only made sense to dig them out of the completely unaccountable traffic jam they had built for themselves.
Frankly, it is a waste of time. It is expensive to build, expensive to maintain going forward, and often already dated by the time it is finished because things have moved on.
Also, as much as I like code, and would personally prefer to build things in code, a lot of internal innovation happens because end users have access to agentic tools. Yet, from the outset, both OpenAI and Anthropic FDE approaches seem heavily code-driven. I might be mistaken.
In my opinion, it is much better to deploy a more customisable harness that sits across the different technology stacks that is also user-friendly. But then I am biased, because that is what we do, so take this comment as you will.
I am curious whether this FDE direction will result in more product and platform complexity that is more difficult to unwind.
your FDEs shape your product strategy, and should be considered R&D. after making sure a customer deployment is successful (by any means necessary btw, even if it means building new systems outside of the product), the crucial next step is to drive the product improvement with PMs and core software engineers after contact with reality. this was a pretty radical idea from palantir in the era of saas
if you only do step 1 you're basically just solutions engineers / mckinsey, and if you only do step 2 with no customer learning to your product you don't improve your platform for all the other customers. the pain becomes the moat
There's a reason why this echelon of companies comp FDEs much, much more than services businesses is because you're trying to find engineering + product + customer facing in one (knew people making 200k+ 5 years ago as new grad FDEs, and the same flavour at the labs is 500k+ easy)
that being said the role has evolved a lot over the years, and depending on the company it could be indistinguishable from solutions eng, or sales eng, or even dev rel. I do recommend people on HN work at one of the elite FDE shops first before commenting though!
However, at my old employer they didn't get commit rights to the main software repos. They had to carry around a bunch of patches which were gradually cleaned up and integrated. As I didn't directly work with them, I don't know if this says more about them or the guys managing the internal development.
Same shit. Different day. The wheel begins a new turning.
With AI coding agents FDEs are now everywhere. One because they can demand a higher salary due to simply doing more due to AI. And two, because AI really accelerates the whole bespoke solution implementation thing. However, from what I hear, none of the actual "integrate that back into your in house platform" stuff is actually happening. So it's a tiny bit of a farce.