Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer
The engineer your customers ask for by name. We find FDEs who ship inside a customer's stack, say no to the wrong request and still get invited back.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Does
Turn "we need AI for claims" into a problem that can ship in six weeks.
Write integrations, pipelines and custom code against the customer's systems.
Get it running in production, often inside the customer's own cloud.
Bring what they learned back to product, so the next deployment is easier.
Why Hire Your Forward Deployed Engineer Through Us
Vetted on Both Halves
Tested on the hands-on skills this role needs and in a live customer role-play. Nobody reaches your loop untested.
Run by a Former FDE
Asher Cohen, a former FDE who has sat in the customer's office at midnight, is on every search. He knows which interview answers fall apart on site.
A Shortlist, Not a Pile
Scorecards and role-play clips instead of a stack of resumes. If they'd lose the room, you never see them.
FDE, Solutions Engineer or Sales Engineer?
The titles get mixed up all the time. Hire the wrong one and they'll hate the job. Here's how to tell them apart.
| Forward Deployed Engineer | Solutions Engineer | Sales Engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When they're involved | After the deal, through go-live and beyond | Late sale into onboarding | Before the deal |
| Writes production code | Yes, every week | Some, mostly configs and scripts | Demos and prototypes |
| Measured on | Customer live, value delivered, expansion | Smooth onboarding | Closed deals |
| Typical background | Software engineer with customer instincts | Technical consultant | Technical seller |
Signs You Need One
- Deals stall after signature because nobody can get the product live.
- Your core engineers keep getting pulled onto customer calls.
- Every big customer needs "just one custom integration."
- Your engineers write one-off code in customer environments, and nobody owns it after launch.
- You sell to enterprises that expect someone in the room.
What Great Looks Like
- Ships working code in an unfamiliar stack within days.
- Has shipped inside a customer's cloud, VPC or on-prem network, and survived their security review.
- Asks the question behind the question.
- Says no to a customer and keeps the relationship.
- Writes the doc so the next FDE doesn't start from zero.
Running the Interviews Yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the questions we use on every candidate. Take it and run our loop in yours.
Sample Job Description
A first draft you can paste into your applicant tracking system and make your own.
About the role. You'll be the engineer our biggest customers work with every day. You'll scope their problems, build what they need on top of [product] and get it running in production.
You'll lead technical discovery, ship integrations in [languages] and turn what you learn in the field into product changes.
You have [3+] years writing production code, and you've worked directly with customers or users.
Hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer: Your Questions
Still have questions? Talk to a former FDE, or email hello@forwarddeployedhiring.com.
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.
Should our first FDE be senior?
Usually, yes. Your first FDE writes the playbook every hire after them follows, so they need to have run a deployment end to end. A strong mid-level engineer works well as your second or third FDE, once there's a playbook to learn from. We'll tell you on the first call which one your situation calls for.
Remote or on-site?
It depends on who you sell to. If your customers expect someone in the room for kickoff and go-live, hire within reach of them. If your deployments run over the cloud and video, hire wherever the best person is. Either way, decide the real travel number, in days per month, before you search. We'll pin it down with you on the first call and confirm it with every candidate.
Can a strong backend engineer grow into the role?
Sometimes. The ones who make it already seek out users: they joined the support rotation, sat in on sales calls or built tools for the ops team. The ones who don't treat every customer request as an interruption. Our customer role-play shows you which kind you're looking at before you spend a final round on them.
How long does it take to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer?
Your first vetted shortlist arrives in under 5 days from kickoff. Every candidate on it has passed our core vetting and the role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. The biggest factor is how fast your team can run final interviews. We handle the scheduling around them so nothing stalls.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
Every candidate has passed our core vetting, run by us: a customer role-play plus a skills test built for this role. For engineering roles, that's a technical screen. For strategists, it's a business case. For your search, shortlisted candidates also run a short role-play built around your customer. You get a scorecard and a 3-minute clip, so you can judge for yourself. Your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. Meet every candidate on your shortlist with no commitment. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire is backed by our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate is strong on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if it means restarting the search. Our concerns go on every scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait a week than make the wrong hire.
What if the hire doesn't work out?
If your hire leaves or isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find you a replacement. We rerun the search with what we learned, vetted the same way, so the second shortlist is sharper than the first.
See Your First Forward Deployed Engineer Candidates in Under 5 Days
Free to interview. 90-day replacement guarantee.