What a forward-deployed engineer actually does

A forward-deployed engineer sits with your team, inside your systems, with your data, and builds there. Not in a lab, not from a spec, not behind a project manager. The title comes from the observation that most AI projects die in the gap between a working prototype and the messy reality of an enterprise environment, and the only reliable way to close that gap is to build inside it from the start.

In practice the FDE's week is split between three things: building the agent, building the evaluation harness that proves the agent works on your cases, and teaching your engineers how both were built so they can carry on without us.

That third part is the point. An FDE engagement is a success when the client team ships the next agent themselves.