Versioning Up Your Career: How Your vNext is an FDE at Salesforce

People talk about “career growth” like it’s some upgrade you just download at your leisure.

Here’s the truth: if your career isn’t version-controlled, it’s basically legacy code.

It’s time to fix that.

Forward Deployed Engineers don’t leave growth to chance, they build it like everything else: with clear systems, smart tests, and a solid deployment plan.

We spoke with Claude Sutterlin, Sarah Khalid, and Ben Kracker, three directors of Forward Deployed Engineering, to learn how you can apply their builder’s mindset to your career and ship your next release: You vNext.

Phase One: Define and Design Your System

Every great product starts with clear design and a deep understanding of the user. In your career, you’re both the product and the user, giving you total control over the roadmap. That means defining your own Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the essential skills, priorities, and outcomes that make your next move both valuable and sustainable.

Just like a product MVP, your career MVP focuses on what’s essential to get you moving forward, minimizing distractions.

Consider these questions:

• What parts of your current role feel like tech debt or are slowing you down?
• What features would your ideal career product have? More autonomy? Real-time impact? Leadership?
• What skills or technologies excite you enough to invest in your next sprint?

Write these down as your career backlog to guide your next steps and assess opportunities that align with your vision.

Becoming a Forward Deployed Engineer is a Natural Fit for Builders

As a veteran builder, Claude’s experience in application development consulting was the perfect, yet unintended, pathway to becoming an FDE. He says he has “always had an entrepreneurial mindset with a passion for combining tech in new and interesting ways.” That is why the FDE role has been such a natural and exciting fit for him.

Claude shares, “The startup/founding mindset, experimenting, building; it’s all there in this role. It has been a challenge in the best way, especially since it’s the heyday for that kind of work within Agentforce.” He concludes, “I’m always building cool, never-been-done experiences, which has been pretty extraordinary for me as someone who loves building.”

A Consultant’s Path to Product Influence

Both Ben and Sarah were consultants before joining Salesforce. “The distinction between a Forward Deployed Engineer and a consultant is what makes this role so unique, and it is something I am truly enjoying,” Ben shares. He explains that while both roles work with customers, the key difference is the FDE’s direct collaboration with the product team. “We act as the voice of the customer, sharing crucial feedback with the product team to influence the product roadmap,” he adds. “This goes beyond a single engagement; we are helping to improve the product for all Salesforce customers.”

Phase Two: Build and Test

With your career requirements defined, it’s time to architect your path, building the framework with new skills and iterative learning.

Think of Trailhead as your career’s CI/CD pipeline.

Trailhead offers tailored learning paths and certifications around Agentforce, AI, and the latest tech trends. You can discover new areas of interest and leverage it as your sandbox for rapid skill development.

“The best way to learn is by actually doing and building things, not just reading about them,” Sarah says. After recently becoming an Agentblazer Legend, she adds, “I was blown away by the enablement resources the Trailhead team created.” The Trailhead team has included real-life scenarios, which Sarah says helps all users. “Agentblazers can learn the technology and see the application — it’s incredible, not just for us but for anyone, anywhere who wants to learn.”

Claude echoes the sentiment, sharing, “There is still plenty of room to establish expertise in AI and Agentforce. It’s such an exciting time to be in this space and so important to keep learning, because there are always new tools and processes being invented.”

Treat learning like an open-source project.

Because teams are building with Agentforce in real time, constant collaboration is key. “We have this really awesome community of FDEs,” Ben says. “The people I work with are so intelligent.” He adds the team holds weekly office hours to do a deep dive into a recent engagement, sharing both successes and struggles. “Learning is more important than ever, and we all prioritize it,” Sarah adds. “Innovation is happening so fast—new features, use cases, best practices—that the conversations we have with each other can trigger new aha-moments for our customers.”

While the audience is mainly FDEs, the team invites speakers from product, sales, and even vendors outside of Salesforce who build tools to support their software engineering and application development. “This ensures we’re pulling knowledge from various areas, not just our internal team,” Ben says, “which helps us avoid becoming an echo chamber.”

Pro Tip: Your personal projects are your ultimate low-cost, high-reward prototypes, allowing you to test and experiment without the risk. What’s a side project you can start this week that aligns with your professional roadmap? We bet there’s a trail for that.

Phase Three: Ship and Scale

Shipping a product isn’t the end; it’s just a new starting line. Great engineers continuously monitor performance, and your career works the same way. Once you’ve deployed your skills in the field, it’s all about learning, collecting feedback, and optimizing for what’s next.

FDEs are in a unique position to do exactly that. 

Instead of being tied to a single customer or industry, FDEs rotate through outcome-driven sprints that build a portfolio of real, high-impact work, providing the signals needed to guide your next iteration. Whether that means stepping into leadership, tackling more complex Agentforce builds, or transitioning cross-functionally into product or customer success, you’ll have the exposure, autonomy, and support to scale what works.

Ben’s advice is to “lean in,” emphasizing that because the team, the role, and the technology are all so new, “there is a huge opportunity to absolutely crush it, if you are motivated to.” He says FDEs are the ones who own the solution for the customer but also create new techniques or ways of thinking that make the solution possible. Ben always advises his team to “document it and mark yourself as the author,” believing everyone should be recognized for their contributions. “Once it is documented, we can source and validate the approach and help it grow,” he adds. “It establishes you as an early expert.”

Sarah, who has been on the Agentforce journey for one year, says it’s “crazy to see how far it’s come.” She laughs about how sometimes her “head spins just thinking of the number of customer use cases. It’s so different from traditional software, the possibilities are endless. I’m just super excited to see what the future holds.”

Claude emphasizes that Salesforce isn’t afraid to act like a startup. “We have the stability of a large organization, but it doesn’t slow us down,” he says, adding that this actually helps them move faster. “Every year, as a company, we reprioritize to an impressive degree by pivoting where we need to, innovating new technologies, creating new teams, and investing strategically.” For Claude, who enjoys working with variety, “This means there is always an opportunity to dive into something new.”

Optimization isn’t a one-time task; it’s a mindset we share at Salesforce. And here, your career becomes the kind of system that gets stronger, smarter, and faster with every iteration.

Ready to Push Your Career to Production?

You’ve done the groundwork, built the MVP, tested your skills. Now it’s time to ship your next version. Make your next move your greatest yet.We’re looking for FDEs with an agent-first mindset and technical fluency who are solution-oriented and impact-driven. If that’s you, apply to our Forward Deployed Engineer opening or explore open roles at Salesforce today.