"Forward Deployed Engineer." That was my new title as of last November, swapped in for "SRE" after I changed jobs. My first reaction? What the hell does that even mean, and what kind of buzzword is this?
After some reading, including this Pragmatic Engineer piece, the combination of duties made more sense. But paper never matches the real day-to-day, so here's what it's actually been like being an FDE at SigNoz for the past 8 months.
The TL;DR from the article in my humble opinion: you become a mix of an SRE and a Solutions Engineer, partnering with sales reps to "deploy" a product inside the customer's environment. But you also become the expert on that environment, adapting the product to their business needs.
That's an oversimplification, of course. The role needs deep knowledge of networking, cloud providers, and the deployment patterns used in production. No two customers are alike, which is what makes it interesting: the product runs differently every single time. You also need to know your own product inside and out, so you can explain it and adapt it.
One thing I keep seeing online is that FDEs mostly work for AI product companies. The title got popular through them, but the work itself is older than the current hype and there's plenty of opportunities to do it without AI in the mix.
