There was a minor freak out at work a few weeks ago as our CEO started dropping the phrase “Forward Deployed Engineers” on an all hands. People started reading up on what the concept was and immediately started worrying that the expectation was that they would need to fit into this “new mold”.

As a primer, I’m stealing this definition from Gergley Orosz because he’s awesome and smarter than me lol:

What’s a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)? A software engineer who alternates between being embedded with customer teams and core product engineering teams.