Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer
An FDE works inside your customer's stack until your product is live and doing its job. We find engineers who have done that before and who customers want back on the next project.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
What a Forward Deployed Engineer does day to day
Turn "we need AI for claims" into a problem that can ship in six weeks.
Write integrations, pipelines and custom code against the customer's systems.
Get it running in production, often inside the customer's own cloud.
Bring what they learned back to your product team so the next deployment goes faster.
Why hire your Forward Deployed Engineer through us
Tested on the work and the customer
Every candidate passes a skills test for this role and a live role-play built around your own customer before they reach your interviews.
Run by a working FDE
Asher Cohen works as a Forward Deployed Engineer and is on every search. He knows which interview answers hold up once someone is on site with a real customer.
A short list with scorecards
You get a small set of candidates, each with a written scorecard from our tests. If we don't think someone would hold up in front of your customer, we don't send them.
FDE, solutions engineer or sales engineer?
Companies mix these titles up all the time, and someone hired into the wrong one usually ends up unhappy in the job. Here's how they differ.
| Forward Deployed Engineer | Solutions Engineer | Sales Engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| When they're involved | After the deal, through go-live and beyond | Late sale into onboarding | Before the deal |
| Writes production code | Yes, every week | Some, mostly configs and scripts | Demos and prototypes |
| Measured on | Customer live, value delivered, expansion | Smooth onboarding | Closed deals |
| Typical background | Software engineer with customer instincts | Technical consultant | Technical seller |
Signs you need one
- Deals stall after signature because nobody can get the product live.
- Your core engineers keep getting pulled onto customer calls.
- Every big customer needs "just one custom integration."
- Your engineers write one-off code in customer environments, and nobody owns it after launch.
- You sell to enterprises that expect someone in the room.
What great looks like
- Ships working code in an unfamiliar stack within days.
- Has shipped inside a customer's cloud, VPC or on-prem network and got through their security review.
- Finds out what the customer is actually trying to fix before building anything.
- Can turn down a customer request and keep the relationship.
- Writes things down so the next FDE doesn't start from zero.
Running the interviews yourself?
Our hiring playbook has the scorecard, the customer role-play script and the interview questions we use on every candidate. You're welcome to use them in your own process.
Sample job description
A first draft to paste into your applicant tracking system and edit to fit your team.
About the role. You'll be the engineer our biggest customers work with every day. You'll scope their problems, build what they need on top of [product] and get it running in production.
You'll lead technical discovery, ship integrations in [languages] and turn what you learn in the field into product changes.
You have [3+] years writing production code, and you've worked directly with customers or users.
Questions about hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer
Anything we haven't covered? Start a search and ask us on the first call, or email us at hello@embedhire.com.
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Should our first FDE be senior?
Usually, yes. Your first FDE sets up the way every later hire will work, so they need to have run a deployment end to end. A strong mid-level engineer works well as your second or third FDE, once there's a playbook to learn from. We'll tell you on the first call which one your situation calls for.
Remote or on-site?
It depends on who you sell to. If your customers expect someone in the room for kickoff and go-live, hire within reach of them. If your deployments run over the cloud and video, hire wherever the best person is. Either way, settle on a real travel number in days per month before you search. We'll work it out with you on the first call and confirm it with every candidate.
Can a strong backend engineer grow into the role?
Sometimes. The ones who make it already go looking for users. They joined the support rotation, sat in on sales calls or built tools for the ops team. The ones who struggle treat every customer request as an interruption. Our customer role-play shows you which kind you're looking at before you spend a final round on them.
How long does it take to hire a Forward Deployed Engineer?
Your first vetted shortlist arrives in under 5 days from kickoff. Everyone on it has passed our skills test and a role-play built around your customer. We aim to get you to a signed offer in 3–4 weeks. What usually decides the timeline is how quickly your team can run final interviews, so we take care of the scheduling to keep the search moving.
How do you vet candidates for this role?
We run two tests before you meet anyone. The first is a skills test for this role. For engineering roles that's a technical screen where they write working code against a messy API, and for strategists it's a business case. The second is a live role-play built around your own customer, which we design with you when we scope the role. You get a written scorecard for every candidate, and your team runs the final interviews.
Is it really free to interview?
Yes. You can meet everyone on your shortlist without committing to anything. If nobody clears your bar, we keep searching. Every hire comes with our 90-day replacement guarantee.
Will you push us to hire someone?
No. If a candidate does well on the skills test but struggles with the customer, we tell you, even if that means going back out to search. Any concerns we have go on the scorecard in writing. We'd rather you wait an extra week than hire the wrong person.
What if the hire doesn't work out?
If your hire leaves or isn't working out in the first 90 days, we find you a replacement. We run the search again using what we learned the first time, and every new candidate goes through the same tests.
See your first Forward Deployed Engineer candidates in under 5 days
Interviewing is free, and every hire comes with a 90-day replacement guarantee.