What's the Deal with Forward Deployed Engineers?

[rubyrenegade]

We're hiring Forward Deployed Engineers at my company but can't seem to find the combo of strong coding chops + customer-facing experience we need. I know Palantir made this a coveted role not too long ago, but rumor has it the enthusiasm is running low. What are you seeing at your company? Is there an alternative role we should be hiring for?

[mech422]

Having held a similiar position for IBM, personally I just don't like dealing with customers. Some are great, others are just a pain ... I like my machines better :-)

You might have more luck looking at people with 'pre-sales engineer' experience for the role? They are used to lots of customer engagement ?

[rubyrenegade]

Thanks for this feedback. Someone recently sent me an article that said the FDE role is going out of style because engineers are getting there and find they don't like the customer work, which is what triggered my question! I'll look into pre-sales engineer. The big challenge here is finding someone who still is an exceptional coder versus a customer-facing person who can manage the coding aspects with AI.

[mech422]

Amazon (use to ?) have roles where your expected to be on-site with clients 20-25% of the time. But given how often they were hiring for the roles, I think the turn over was pretty high.

Anyway - Good luck!

[gus_massa]

There is an official monthly post for jobs. Remember to repost in the correct thread by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring on April 1st. You can take a look at the current last post, but they are read only now.

[JimsonYang]

FYI you might want to do this via [ask hn] to get a more appropriate response.

Regarding your question, there needs to be more context- specifically why do you need an fde that you can’t do via backend engineer. Palantir was special and it’s incorrect to use broad strokes to apply to every company

[rubyrenegade]

Thank you! I couldn't figure out how to post there. Guess I need to figure it out! A backend engineer might be OK if they had some solid customer-facing experience as well. I hear your point on Palantir, I just used it as an example because it's so commonly known. The big challenge here is finding people who A) have both skill sets and B) want this kind of role.