Forward Deployed Engineer Course
Understand the forward deployed engineer role: working with customers, shipping fast, and turning messy problems into solutions.
24 lessons · about 5 hours of reading · Free
Start lesson 1Course syllabus24 Lessons
What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer?
Learn what forward deployed engineers do, how the role varies by employer, and how it differs from software engineering, solutions engineering, consulting, and sales engineering.
A Day in the Life of a Forward Deployed Engineer
Follow an FDE through a fictional customer engagement, from the first workflow walkthrough to testing, handoff, operations, and product feedback.
FDE Career Paths, Tiers, and Interview Gates
Map your current engineering strengths to FDE work, understand how employer expectations differ, and prepare for coding, system design, customer problem, and delivery interviews.
Build Your Forward Deployed Engineer Skill Map
Assess your current engineering and delivery skills, choose a useful learning order, and practise with a small fictional customer engagement.
Requirements Gathering with a Customer
Turn a broad customer request into evidence-backed requirements, open questions, and checks a team can agree on.
Discovery, Scoping, and Sequencing Customer Work
Agree on a useful first slice, test the riskiest assumptions early, and keep scope and decisions visible to the customer.
Audit Customer Data Before You Build
Inspect an unfamiliar data export for missing values, types, duplicate rows and keys, schema changes, and access questions before using it.
Enterprise Workflow, Business Value, and ROI
Map how a customer completes work today, identify where it breaks, and frame a value hypothesis that can be checked against a baseline.
Choosing an AI Approach for a Customer
Compare a fixed workflow, a model call, retrieval, tuning, and an agent against the task, customer constraints, and evidence.
Build a Working Prototype Fast
Put a useful prototype in front of a customer quickly, while making its data, integrations, limits, and unfinished work clear.
Integration Engineering and the Last Mile
Connect a customer workflow to systems you do not control, with clear contracts, safe access, bounded retries, and named owners.
Working Safely with Legacy Systems
Learn an unfamiliar system before changing it, isolate old formats behind an adapter, and make retries and writes safer.
Data Pipelines for AI Features
Prepare approved customer data for an AI feature with clear quality gates, freshness checks, lineage, and privacy boundaries.
Evals as Acceptance Criteria
Turn customer-approved requirements into repeatable checks, a clear release gate, and evidence that stays useful after launch.
Debugging Agent Logic and Observability
Trace an AI failure across its steps, collect useful evidence safely, and give the customer a clear incident update.
Deploying in the Customer's Cloud
Plan a deployment around the customer's account boundaries, identity, network, secrets, approvals, and operational ownership.
Cost, Latency and Inference Choices
Estimate what an AI feature costs at real customer volume, measure its response time, and choose optimizations against agreed quality targets.
Security, Privacy and AI Governance
Prepare a customer security review by mapping data, identities, trust boundaries, supplier terms, and accountable owners.
Stakeholders and Communication
Map who is affected and who decides, then keep a customer engagement aligned with clear, timely updates.
Technical Writing for Handoff
Write the README, architecture notes, runbooks, and decision records a customer team needs to operate the work.
UAT, Go-Live, and Day 2 Operations
Validate the service with customer users, release it in controlled stages, and agree who operates it after launch.
Executive Reporting and Proving ROI
Show leaders what changed, what the evidence supports, and which decision or investment comes next.
The Product Feedback Loop
Turn what you learn in customer work into clear product evidence, reusable improvements, or a deliberate customer-specific choice.
Capstone: Run an Engagement End to End
Follow a fictional customer engagement from discovery through handoff, operations, executive reporting, and product feedback.
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Frequently asked questions
Who is the Forward Deployed Engineer course for?
Working developers moving into a customer-facing engineering role, and people who hire or work with forward deployed engineers.
What do I need before starting the Forward Deployed Engineer course?
You can already build a small web service and use Git. This is not a beginner course.
What will I learn in the Forward Deployed Engineer course?
You will run a customer engagement end to end, from messy problem to working solution.
How long does the Forward Deployed Engineer course take?
It has 24 lessons and about 5 hours of reading, before you spend time on the practice tasks. Go at your own pace; the lessons are written to be done in order.
Is the Forward Deployed Engineer course free?
Yes. Every lesson is free to read, and you do not need to sign in.