Forward-deployed engineering roles have grown 10x year-over-year as companies like OpenAI, Ramp, and Nominal embed engineers directly with enterprise customers to solve bleeding-edge problems and feed insights back into product roadmaps—making FDE a strategic function for winning upmarket segments and pushing model capabilities.
Key Takeaways
FDE at Ramp has a broad mandate to 'do whatever it takes to win enterprise'—building core roadmap features alongside custom solutions without restrictions, positioning it as the team accountable for upmarket segment success.
Nominal uses FDE as a core company value ('empower their mission') to learn where the bleeding edge of product is and what users need to unlock workflows, directly feeding customer insights into longer-term product strategy.
Dataland's FDE function is 'the lifeblood of the company'—building heterogeneous, customer-specific AI agents rather than selling a single platform, proving FDE's necessity in highly fragmented enterprise markets.
OpenAI's FDE team operates on two mandates: finding repeatable market problems to ship as separate products or integrate into models, plus tackling the hardest industries (semiconductors, life sciences) to push model capabilities through post-training improvements.
The 10x growth in FDE roles contradicts the intuition that improving AI models and software reduce the need for embedded engineering—suggesting FDE has become a core competitive advantage for enterprise adoption and customization.
[music] >> First of all, thank you all for being here. This is an incredible turnout for a Tuesday night. Um, there are a lot of folks here who are starting their own companies and interested in a forward-deployed motion for their company. Um, a lot of folks who are interested in the FD function, um, potentially becoming an FD. So, we will cover a bunch of relevant topics tonight and have an amazing lineup for you. Um, before we get started, I'm Finn. I'm one of the partners at South Park Commons. Uh, for those who don't know or are unfamiliar with the community, South Park Commons is a place for builders who are exploring their next uh, adventure, whether that is starting a company, um, doing independent research, working on open source software, to come and pursue technical projects of a…