Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

An engineer from our team embedded in yours — working in your codebase, your tools and your meetings to ship the integrations, internal tools and AI workflows your roadmap keeps postponing.

Overview

An engineer from our team embedded in yours — working in your codebase, your tools and your meetings to ship the integrations, internal tools and AI workflows your roadmap keeps postponing.

What a forward deployed engineer is

An engineer who works inside your organisation rather than across the table from it. They join your stand-ups, work in your repositories and tools, and sit close to the people whose problems they are solving — on site or remote, whichever the work needs.

The role comes from companies that deploy complex software into large organisations, where the hardest part is rarely the code. It is understanding the workflow, the data and the constraints well enough to build the right thing, and that understanding comes from being there.

When it is the right model

When the problem sits between your systems rather than inside one of them: integrations, internal tools, data pipelines, or AI workflows that have to fit how your people actually work.

When your team knows the domain but not the technology, or knows the technology but has no capacity left. And when the usual project — scope, estimate, hand over — keeps failing because the requirements only become clear once someone is building.

How it differs from a project

A project delivers a defined thing and ends. An engagement like this works against a problem, and the definition sharpens as the work proceeds. You see working software every week, in your own environment, and priorities can move when the evidence says they should.

How an engagement runs

It starts with a short discovery inside your environment: who does the work today, where the data lives, and what breaks. Together we pick the first problem worth solving and agree how we will know it is solved.

From there the engineer ships in small increments inside your stack, pairing with your people as they go — so what gets learned stays with your team rather than leaving with ours.

Working in your environment

Your repositories, your cloud, your security policies and your review process. Access is scoped to what the work needs and removed when it ends, and nothing is built in a private sandbox and thrown over the wall.

Changes go through the same pull requests and the same checks as your own engineers' work, which is how they stay maintainable after we have gone.

Handing it back

An engagement ends with your team able to run, change and extend what was built: documented, tested, and walked through with the people who will own it.

The aim is that you do not need us for the next one — and that you would rather have us anyway.