Forward-deployed engineers have a blend of people skills and deep tech knowledge, and lots of companies are hiring for the role.
Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Nina Lawrenson/Adobe Stock
Thomas Baucom is friendly and unassuming, for someone who holds what’s been hailed as the “hottest job in tech.”
He’s a forward-deployed engineer (FDE) at Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly, where he embeds with clients like universities and large companies to solve their specific problems using customized coding and product fixes.
His title was virtually nonexistent before last year, and now it’s everywhere. Amazon invested $1 billion in a forward-deployed engineer org in June, only to be quickly outdone by Microsoft’s $2.5 billion FDE investment. Google and Accenture jointly announced their own version last month.
The trend is being driven by the complexities of implementing AI at companies, according to Mukul Saha, a senior director analyst at Gartner.
“Forward-deployed engineers address that last-mile problem by putting people with deep product and technical expertise directly alongside customers,” he said. “At one end of the spectrum, the role looks relatively close to solutions engineering or technical consulting. At the other, FDEs are hands-on engineers who write production code, redesign workflows, and work directly with product and engineering teams to turn lessons from individual customers into reusable product capabilities.”
It pays to be friendly and diplomatic in this role. Many companies have different ideas of what exactly the job should entail, but it always involves consulting directly with clients on engineering work, as well as liaising with backend product and engineering teams.
Superhuman Chief People Officer Kenny Mendes said the job requires candidates who can think like consultants, with enough technical know-how to push out production-level code. FDEs have more knowledge of product offerings than sales or go-to-market teams, and enough understanding of the broader tech landscape to have detailed conversations with CIOs about where those products can fit their company, he said.
“They’re blending together very technical skills, being able to understand complex new technologies…to solve customer problems,” Mendes said. “They have to be really great customer-facing folks, people that understand change management.”
One day Baucom might be working with a university to design an agent that tells students which classes they need to graduate. The next he could be helping a company turn a house style guide into an AI tool, or coaching a major sports team on workflows.
“If you’re looking for a cookie-cutter type thing, the FDE is going to be the worst schedule possible,” Baucom said.
Mendes said the AI shift has demanded a more hands-on approach with clients. Rather than having a sales team that “hands the baton over” for technical or product needs, the FDE “carries the thread throughout.”
“The FDEs end up being the primary consultants to those customers as they’re thinking through their hardest problems,” Mendes said.
Palantir is credited with pioneering the FDE model in the early 2010s, and this type of role isn’t entirely novel. It’s similar to existing jobs like solutions architect, solutions engineer, and consultants more broadly, according to Saha. What’s different about FDEs is the scope of their responsibilities, Saha said.
“Traditional solutions engineers often focus heavily on architecture, technical validation, and enabling the sale,” Saha said. “A true FDE is typically expected to go further into implementation, working alongside the customer from problem discovery through building and production deployment, while also feeding what they learn back into the core product.”
At Superhuman, Baucom is part of the product team, though where FDEs are placed can vary from company to company. He attends meetings across a variety of different teams to stay on top of everything the company is building.
“I try to spend a lot of time with each one of the teams, attend their all-hands, so that I have the currency with those relationships,” Baucom said. “But I also get all the insights for what they’re building in product because I want to build stuff that’s outside of the current building blocks, but I also want to build stuff that is going to be helpful for them.”
Of course, while Baucom is empowered to build outside of the main product pipeline, he still has to undergo the same checks and processes before his code ships, Mendes said.
“Any engineering organization would be extremely worried about the idea of a non-technical person, a non-engineer, making decisions and shipping code that they will then have to maintain forever and ever,” Mendes said.
So where does a business find such technical but socially adept talent?
It’s tricky, because the newness of the title makes even a simple LinkedIn search a challenge. Baucom started his career with 15 years at Apple, where he worked across a variety of mostly customer-facing roles and morphed into “this kind of Swiss Army knife,” in his words. When he left for the documents startup Coda, which was then acquired by Grammarly, his manager on the customer success team encouraged him to develop his technical skills.
“I kept finding myself saying, ‘Oh, that product’s on the roadmap. I’ll let you know when we can bring that out. Hopefully it’s very soon,’ and finding myself more and more with some of the tools that we had, making prototypes for people and committing small bits of code,” Baucom said.
Mendes said Superhuman looks for people with experience across technical and customer-facing roles as well as a curious mindset. In Baucom’s case, Mendes said, he taught himself the more technical side of the role through AI.
“Even though day-to-day he was in that [customer success manager] role, you quickly saw that Thomas was one of the first people in our company to really become AI-native,” Mendes said. “He was prototyping brand new features. He’s even won multiple engineering hackathons. Typically, it’s only the engineers that won that.”
Mendes said typical backgrounds for an FDE might include those who studied technical majors in college, then went on to do customer-facing work in sales or consulting. Companies inaugurating FDE teams will often either offer customer-facing employees technical training, or provide customer relationship education to technical engineers, according to Mendes.
Saha said he expects the FDE role to continue to grow, though the title may change as businesses develop similar cross-departmental teams rather than relying on vendor FDEs.
“Over time, I expect more enterprises to develop FDE-like internal teams that combine engineering, product, architecture, and domain expertise to maintain and expand their AI capabilities,” Saha said.
