FDEs: The Role Quietly Eating Traditional Pre/Post-Sales Alive

One minute you’re the confident veteran running big sales cycles the old-fashioned way…  The next you’re quietly googling “FDE” at 2 a.m., realizing the hoodie-wearing geniuses just changed the game.

If you lead pre-sales, solutions engineering, or customer success teams in B2B tech right now — pay very close attention.

The role everyone is suddenly obsessed with:
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE).

Palantir pioneered it.  Now OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and every serious AI company is building entire teams of them.

They’re not “solutions engineers doing demos.”
They’re not “customer success making you love the product.”

An FDE is the rare hybrid who:
• Writes production code inside your firewall
• Fine-tunes models on your proprietary data
• Turns a promising PoC into tens of millions in sticky, expanding ARR

Think: startup CTO embedded at your most strategic customers.

After 15+ years leading pre- and post-sales organizations, I’ve watched engineers do exactly this magic for decades — we just never gave it a name, a career track, or the compensation it finally deserves.

I’m publishing a series on everything I’m learning about building and leading world-class FDE teams: the KPIs, hiring playbooks, org structure, career paths, and the hard-won lessons.