Today’s Hottest Role: Forward Deployed Engineer

The software company Palantir pioneered the forward deployed engineer role in the early 2010s, when it embedded engineers directly with customers — mostly government agencies — to help implement products. Palantir called these engineers “Deltas” at the time and, until 2016, had more Deltas than software engineers. 

The role evolved and gained huge traction this year, when tech giants like Open AI announced they were hiring FDE teams. Analysis by Indeed and The Financial Times found that job postings for this role soared by more than 800% between January and September of 2025. Salesforce alone has committed to building a team of 1,000 FDEs.

Competition for these engineers is so intense that one commenter on an FDE Reddit post wrote, “Since converting to an FDE, my LinkedIn is insane, so many great roles coming my way and for really high pay.” 

In many ways, forward deployed engineers are like traditional tech consultants. “But the biggest difference is the agility and speed at which we move,” said Khalid. “We’re able to go in and just do what we need to do to get the agent up and running in a way that’s unique and powerful.” 

The role varies from company to company, but at Salesforce — which launched its team in April 2025 — FDEs work in several ways. Many work individually with a customer, but some are starting to work in pods that consist of one deployment strategist and two FDEs. 

The deployment strategist identifies the best use case for a company and creates the overall AI strategy. The FDEs then design, build, and deploy the agent. They’re the team’s technical architects and primary coders. 

Pods focus full-time on one client for about three months — or as long as it takes to successfully deploy an agent for one or two use cases. Sometimes, they even travel to the customer and embed themselves in the company’s day-to-day work. 

It may sound like forward deployed engineers do the same work as Salesforce partners, but they play different roles, and their collaboration can help customers launch agents more successfully. Partners still do the nitty-gritty work of helping customers implement technology, but FDEs can provide behind-the-scenes knowledge from Salesforce that a partner may not have. 

How can Salesforce customers work with FDEs?  At the moment, they must be nominated by their account executive to be in the Momentum program, offered to select customers for free. “It’s an investment by Salesforce in our customers,” said Paige Elia, senior consultant, FDE programs, at Salesforce. Sometime in the next year, however, customers will also have the option to purchase FDE services.   

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The future starts now

One reason competition for forward deployed engineers is so fierce is that the role requires an unusual combination of skills: Not only do you need to be a tech whiz, you also have to communicate well and be comfortable in a customer-facing role. Forget the stereotype of a nerdy software engineer coding alone with a can of Soylent. FDEs and deployment strategists have to listen to customers, understand how business works, and offer solutions in language non-techies can understand. 

Here are the skills you need to be a great FDE:

Problem-solving

More than anything, forward deployed engineers must love solving puzzles. Why? Because the technology is so new, everyone is still trying to figure it out. “Problem-solving is the number one skill an FDE needs to have,” said Kracker. “We are right in there with the customer, who does not know what they do not know, and it’s on us to be the technical authority and figure it out.”  

Technical skills

FDEs need to be a jack-of-all-trades of tech skills, with a knowledge of everything from writing an Apex function to creating a custom JavaScript implementation. “On any given day, you might be writing agent instructions, experimenting with prompts, working through a tricky integration, or collaborating with the product team to shape features based on what we’re learning in the field,” said Khalid. 

Communication skills

Soft skills matter, too. Because FDEs interact so often with customers, they must be clear and effective communicators. “It’s very important to have those customer-facing skills,” Khalid said. “We often engage with business stakeholders and executive stakeholders, and they definitely don’t understand technical jargon.”  

Business acumen

It’s not enough for forward deployed engineers to communicate well, though. They also need business acumen so they can understand why a customer wants a particular feature or use case. “It requires the FDE to peel back the layers of the onion to figure out exactly what’s at the core of a request and why a customer is making it, so we can give them the right solution, as opposed to the solution they’re asking for,” Kracker said. 

A learning mindset

Agentic technology is evolving so quickly that there’s always something new to learn — and FDEs constantly learn on the fly. “FDEs have to be super ready, super smart, and super skilled, and of course have a passion to learn,” said Jude Umeh, deployment strategist director at Salesforce, “because this is a continuous learning environment.” 

The good news? Many of the skills you need to become a forward deployed engineer can be acquired through Trailhead, the free learning platform from Salesforce. For example, you can earn certifications, take a specialist exam, or become an Agentblazer Legend, the highest tier of Agentforce training on Trailhead.  

Salesforce also offers a six-week onboarding program, called Ready in Six, for new hires to the FDE team. The program includes technical training, field work, and a capstone project. Alex Imperiale, one of the newest members of the FDE team, completed the training after he transitioned from a technical architect role at Salesforce. He especially enjoyed the program’s two-week intensive on-site. “We had incredible faculty who gave live demos of the tools that will help us in our day-to-day work, including sessions from Elements and hands-on exercises with Cuneiform, which were really cool,” he said. 

One of the biggest advantages of working with a forward deployed engineer is that they serve as a two-way street between customers and the product team. FDEs help accelerate the adoption of AI agents, but they also solicit feedback on what’s working for customers and what’s not. “We feed all those insights we get from being on the frontline back to the product team and engineers so they can build a product that supports what our customers are trying to achieve,” said Kracker. In other words, FDEs give customers a voice. 

Salesforce’s early FDE customers, for example, asked for more ways to measure their agents’ performance. The FDEs passed this information on to the product and engineering teams, and Salesforce developed Agentforce Observability, a suite of tools that helps customers analyze, monitor, and improve their agents’ performance. Customers also wanted to know how their agents came up with answers, which led to session-data tracing in Agentforce. 

As AI agents become more and more common, the FDE role is likely to grow. And for good reason: FDEs can be the make-or-break factor in launching an agent. “Without FDEs, we risk having thousands of customers stuck in pilot purgatory — signed up, but not successfully deployed,” said Khalid. 

Image credit: Aleona Pollauf/Salesforce