The Forward Deployed Engineer

### Description

Forward Deployed Engineer is the fastest-growing engineering role in AI right now — job postings have grown roughly 40x between 2023 and 2025 — but it's also one of the most misunderstood roles in the market. People constantly confuse FDE with Solutions Engineer (a sales-adjacent, demo-driving role) or a generic implementation consultant. It's neither.
At this first event, we're going to break down what the role actually is: what an FDE does day-to-day, how it differs from other client-facing technical roles, which companies are hiring right now (OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Scale AI, plus a growing wave of scale-ups), and what technical stack is expected today (RAG, evals, agents, fine-tuning, guardrails).

What we'll cover:

• What an FDE actually is — and isn't (the real Venn diagram: production engineering + client communication + domain expertise)
• Why the role is exploding right now — and why it's likely structural, not a passing trend
• Real salary ranges (base, total comp, day rates) — and why the numbers you see on Glassdoor/ZipRecruiter are way below what frontier labs actually pay
• What companies are really evaluating in FDE interviews, and the most common mistakes that sink strong technical candidates
• Open Q&A + networking with other engineers considering the jump