In this post11 sections
- Why strong engineers stall in FDE loops
- What transfers from software engineering
- What does not transfer on its own
- What hiring leaders screen for, and against
- The stories to build before you apply
- The rounds to practice that your job never tested
- Résumé lines to rewrite
- Start with the free module
- Questions people ask
- Keep reading
- More from the blog
You are a good engineer. You ship, you review, you get paged and fix it, and you have started to notice that the part of the job you like most is the rare day you talk to the person who uses what you built. So you look at postings, and the loop in front of you tests things your job never asked you to do. The short answer: yes, you can switch. Palantir even ran a rotation, Project Frontline, that turned its software engineers into FDEs, Vinoo Ganesh wrote in Latent Space in September 2026. Source 1The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job RightPublisherLatent SpaceSource typenews report Your engineering transfers; what you build on purpose is scoping from the user, talking to customers and stories where you own the outcome. For the full comparison of the two roles, read the FDE vs software engineer guide; this post is the switching plan.
Why strong engineers stall in FDE loops
A strong software engineer can walk into an FDE loop and fail it without ever writing a bad line of code. The failures look like this:
- The open-ended round. The prompt is “a hospital wants fewer readmissions”. You start sketching services and a database. Twenty minutes later the interviewer still does not know who the user is or what you would ship first.
- The customer round. The “customer” says the integration is late and they are upset. You explain, correctly, why the vendor’s API is at fault. The customer gets more upset.
- The behavioral round. “Tell me about a time you owned a customer outcome.” Your best stories are about a migration the team did, told in “we”, for users you never met.
None of those is an engineering failure. Each is a skill your job did not exercise, because on a product team someone else talks to the customer, someone else decides scope, and your work reaches users through a release train. The FDE job removes those layers. The loop checks whether you can work without them.
Formats vary by company. Palantir tells candidates to reach a concrete approach and a working idea on open-ended problems, Source 2Palantir Careers | Navigating Open-Ended QuestionsPublisherPalantirSource typecompany hiring page and its former FDE recruiting lead told First Round Review, in February 2026, that its FDE interviews asked what questions candidates would ask the customer. Source 3So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherFirst Round ReviewSource typenews report
What transfers from software engineering
More than you might think, and it is the hard part to teach.
The technical bar. At Ramp, FDE candidates face the same technical bar and must pass the software engineering interview loop, Leo Mehr, its Director of Engineering, said in June 2026. Source 4What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview Your coding practice, your system design reps and your debugging instincts all still count.
Depth that is hard to learn later. Business sense can be learned, but being the technical expert in the room is very hard to teach, said Jia Wu, a deployed engineering lead at Cognition, which hires software engineers with deep technical spikes. He said it at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, in a talk posted in July 2026. Source 5How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Cognition (Jia Wu; AI Engineer World's Fair 2026)PublisherAI EngineerSource typerecorded talk or interview That is the half of the job you already bring; the other half is what the rest of this post builds.
The definition itself. An FDE is a customer-facing software engineer: someone you would hire as a software engineer who you would also trust in front of a customer. That is how Kevin Bai, of Anthropic’s applied AI team and formerly the first member of Rippling’s FDE team, put it at the same AI Engineer World’s Fair. Source 6Forward Deployed Engineering 101 (Kevin Bai, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic; AI Engineer World's Fair 2026)PublisherAI EngineerSource typerecorded talk or interview He said his current work was off the table, so read it as his general view, not Anthropic’s hiring criteria. The first half of that sentence is already you.
Work you have done that looks like FDE work. Look for these in your own history: the integration you owned for one big customer, the incident call where you spoke to the affected team, the internal tool whose users sat two desks away. Customer-facing experience helps but is not necessary for Ramp FDE candidates, Mehr wrote on Ramp’s engineering blog in August 2025; former instructors or teaching assistants who enjoyed it have shown the ability and interest to handle customers well. Source 7Forward Deployed Engineering (Leo Mehr, Director, Engineering)PublisherRamp Builders (engineering blog)Source typecompany blog If you have been the on-call person for an internal platform, you have handled customers.
What does not transfer on its own
Three habits serve you well on a product team and hurt you in front of a customer.
Taking the ticket as the truth. On a product team, scope arrives groomed. In the field it does not. What customers describe in scoping often does not match the data and system reality, so the team biases toward moving fast and re-scoping to the most useful thing it can do, Colin Jarvis, then Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI, told The Pragmatic Engineer in August 2025. Source 8What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (Gergely Orosz)PublisherThe Pragmatic EngineerSource typenews report In an interview, that means your first move is a question, not a design.
Loving the thing you built. A failure pattern Jarvis named on a South Park Commons panel in May 2026: people who come to love the form of what they built more than its function. Source 9The Future of Forward Deployed Engineering | OpenAI, Ramp, Nominal, DatalandPublisherSouth Park Commons (YouTube)Source typerecorded talk or interview The best FDEs, he said, will tear a solution up and build something completely different when users do not use it. A clean architecture no one uses is a failure in this job, and your stories need to show you know it.
Waiting for the right abstraction. Bob McGrew, introduced as an early Palantir executive, said on Y Combinator’s Lightcone podcast (Y Combinator, YouTube) in September 2025 that for Deltas you want someone really good at prototyping, and that the wrong profile is a craftsman who loves getting the abstractions exactly right. Source 10The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherY Combinator, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview Deltas is Palantir’s name for its forward deployed software engineers. Source 11Palantir Careers | Students and Early TalentPublisherPalantir TechnologiesSource typecompany hiring page Good taste in abstractions still matters; it just comes second to getting something in front of the user.
What hiring leaders screen for, and against
Our lesson what hiring leaders say they look for, part of Pro, sorts them company by company; here are the ones that bear on a switch.
For: wanting to be closer to users. Software engineers who say they want to be closer to customers or users are a great predictor of a good FDE fit, Mehr said on the dearCC podcast in June 2026. Source 4What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview If that is why you are switching, say it, and back it with something you did.
For: engineers who change the product. The engineers who mattered on Palantir’s Frontline rotation came back and changed what was built, Ganesh wrote in Latent Space, not the ones who shipped the most for customers. Source 1The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job RightPublisherLatent SpaceSource typenews report For you, that is a story to have: a time field feedback changed the product, not only one customer’s setup.
Against: dogmatism. A candidate who came in overly dogmatic or set in their ways was a red flag, said Shilpa Balaji, who joined Palantir as an FDE and went on to lead FDE recruiting. She told First Round Review, in February 2026, that people with more than 10 years at a FAANG company, for example, were in the “no fly zone”. Source 3So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherFirst Round ReviewSource typenews report That is one recruiting lead’s view, not a rule anyone publishes. The part you control is the dogmatism: every “we always do it this way” in your answers is evidence against you.
The stories to build before you apply
What follows is our switching plan, not an employer’s checklist. Start with stories, because every round draws on them. Build five from your own work, each about two minutes aloud:
- The closer-to-users story. The moment you found you liked the user side of the work. This is your answer to “why FDE?”; our free lesson on the bridge story shows how to shape it, and how to answer “why FDE?” so it survives follow-ups pressure-tests it.
- The customer story. One named customer, by role, whom you answered to. Internal teams count if they could have said no to your work. The question on customer-facing experience drills the follow-ups.
- The scope-was-wrong story. A time the request did not match the reality in the data or the system, and what you shipped instead. The question on working inside a customer’s environment fits it.
- The thrown-away story. Something you built and then dropped because users did not use it, and what you learned. This is the direct answer to Jarvis’s failure pattern, and it is a behavioral question in our bank.
- The changed-the-product story. A fix you made for one user that you then pushed into the product for everyone.
If your stories are told in “we”, mark each sentence as yours, the team’s or context, and rewrite yours as decisions before you rehearse. The ownership audit walks through that line by line.
One story, rewritten (a fictional team)
- As a software engineer tells it: “We migrated the reporting service to a new queue, which improved reliability.”
- As an FDE candidate tells it: “The finance team kept rerunning month-end reports by hand because ours failed at night. I sat with their lead for an afternoon, found the failures came from one upstream export, and shipped a retry plus an alert to her inbox. She stopped rerunning them. Then I moved the retry into the shared queue so every team got it.”
Same work. The second version has a user, a decision, a result on the user’s side and a change to the product.
If you have no customer at all yet, read how to show you can handle customers without customer-facing experience before you write story two.
The rounds to practice that your job never tested
Keep your coding and system design sharp: Ramp, for one, still puts FDE candidates through its software engineering loop. Source 4What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview Then spend new practice time on the rounds your job gave you no reps for.
The open-ended round
A vague problem, a whiteboard and an interviewer who answers questions. The instinct to fight is designing before you know who the user is.
Words that help in the first minutes:
- “Before I design anything: who uses this on a Monday morning, and what do they do today instead?”
- “What would make this a success for them in a month, in their terms?”
- “Here’s the smallest version I’d put in front of that person first, and what it would tell us.”
Our free lesson on the open-ended round and the method on one page runs the whole method on a short case.
Back to the hospital. A better first minute: “Who owns readmissions today, a discharge nurse? What do they look at before a patient goes home? If the answer is a paper checklist, my first version is a list of tomorrow’s discharges ranked by risk, in the tool they already open, and in two weeks I’d check whether they called the top five.” That names a user, a first release and a success test before a single box.
The customer round
A role-play with an upset or vague customer. The trap for an engineer is being right at the customer: explaining the cause before you have shown you understood the cost.
- “Before I explain anything, let me make sure I understand what this broke for you this week.”
- “Here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know yet, and here’s when you’ll hear from me.”
- “What’s driving the deadline?” When a sales rep urgently demands an integration, a well-trained FDE pauses to ask what is driving the urgency, who will use it and whether the workarounds are exhausted, Mehr said in an AI Engineer talk published in July 2026. Source 12How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Ramp — Leo Mehr (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherAI Engineer, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview He described the job, not an interview, but the move carries straight into a customer round.
Back to the late integration. Instead of blaming the vendor’s API: “That’s a week your team planned around, and I’m sorry. Which date actually matters to you, and what breaks if we miss it? Then I’ll tell you what’s blocking us and what I can get you by Friday.”
Our free lesson on what customer rounds look like, and the core moves lists the formats and the moves.
Common mistakes, and the fix
- Answering the stated question only. Fix: ask one “why now?” question before you design.
- Defending your design when the customer pushes back. Fix: say what would change your mind, then change it.
- Polishing the first version. Fix: say “this is the ugly version, and here’s what I’d clean up after the user tries it”.
- Telling stories in “we”. Fix: rewrite each “we” sentence as a decision you made.
A four-week switching plan
Our plan for someone working full time, with one coding problem a day throughout. Adjust the order to your weaker side.
| When | Focus |
|---|---|
| First week | Write the five stories. Tell each aloud and record it. |
| Second week | Open-ended round: one case a day, out loud, with a timer. |
| Third week | Customer round: role-play with a friend who pushes back. |
| Fourth week | Rewrite the résumé, run a full mock, fix what the mock showed. |
Résumé lines to rewrite
Your résumé is the first place a switch shows. If your lines describe systems rather than users, the switch does not show. Our rule: every line names who it was for, what you decided and what changed for them. The FDE résumé guide covers the whole document; here are three rewrites, with fictional results to show the shape.
Before:
Built microservices in Go for
the payments platform.
After:
Owned the payout integration
for our largest merchant; ran
their weekly call, found why 3%
of payouts stalled, and shipped
a fix they signed off on.Before:
Improved API latency by 40%.
After:
Cut p95 latency for the
support team's lookup API
from 2s to 300ms after
shadowing agents; handle time
per ticket fell by a minute.Before:
Worked on internal tooling.
After:
Built the data-quality checker
the analytics team asked for;
replaced it in week two with a
simpler alert when they didn't
use the dashboard.The third is the thrown-away story in one line. It shows the exact trait Jarvis described, and it gives the interviewer a question to ask you.
Start with the free module
Tonight, write story one, the closer-to-users story. The bridge story lesson is free and takes you through it. Our curriculum starts with The FDE role, decoded, a free module that covers what FDEs do, how to read a posting and the bridge story. Then rehearse the hospital-style scoping against a customer who answers back in the free practice case; it needs only a sign-in. The later modules and the full question bank come with Pro, which starts with a 7-day free trial. The pricing page has the details.
Questions people ask
Can a software engineer become a forward deployed engineer?
Yes, and Ramp, for one, looks for that motive. Ramp’s Director of Engineering has said that software engineers who say they want to be closer to customers or users are a great predictor of FDE fit. What you build on purpose is the part a product team hands to someone else, such as scoping a problem from the user and talking to customers.Source 4What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview
Do FDE interviews test the same things as software engineering interviews?
Partly. Ramp’s Director of Engineering has said FDE candidates at Ramp must pass the software engineering interview loop. Palantir’s own guidance for open-ended interview problems tells candidates to reach a concrete approach and a working idea, and scoping a vague problem is something a software engineering job gives you little practice for.Source 2Palantir Careers | Navigating Open-Ended QuestionsPublisherPalantirSource typecompany hiring pageSource 4What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview
What mistake do FDE leaders see engineers make?
Colin Jarvis, who leads forward deployed engineering at OpenAI, named as a failure pattern people who come to love the form of what they built more than its function. He said the best FDEs will tear a solution up and build something completely different when users do not use it.Source 9The Future of Forward Deployed Engineering | OpenAI, Ramp, Nominal, DatalandPublisherSouth Park Commons (YouTube)Source typerecorded talk or interview
Keep reading
Lessons
Questions
- Why forward deployed engineering, and not a software engineering role?
- What customer-facing experience do you have? Be specific about who the customer was.
- Tell me about a time you threw away something you had built because it was not delivering value.
- Tell me about a time you worked inside a customer’s environment rather than your own. What was hardest?
More from the blog
The FDE role
From consulting to forward deployed engineer: what employers say about consultants, and how to make the move
OpenAI’s FDE team has ex-consultants, and Palantir says a Delta is not a consultant. What transfers from consulting, what doesn’t, and the coding plan.
The FDE role
Is FDE a step down from software engineering? What the hiring-bar evidence says
A friend called FDE ‘SWE-lite’. What hiring leaders and candidates say about the FDE technical bar, how to judge a role, and how to stay sharp in one.
The FDE role
Can you become a forward deployed engineer as a new grad? Who hires, and what they ask for
Palantir, C3 AI and a few others post FDE roles for new grads. Who posts them, what they ask for, and how to show customer skill without a job history.