Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 3d ago
🚀 Super Thrilled to share that The Forward Deployed Engineer is now in Early Release on O'Reilly!
The first two chapters are live:
• The Founder Inside Someone Else’s Company
• Technical Discovery and Scoping
Most AI engineering books teach you to build on your own codebase. This one lives entirely in the customer’s environment. Their data, their systems, their security review, their stakeholders. You own the outcome and the deadline. Nothing else is yours.
That is the FDE job. One person owning discovery, scoping, build, deployment, verification, and the customer relationship, inside a company that is not theirs. The closest role in engineering to being a founder, with someone else’s constraints.
The book covers:
• Technical discovery and scoping for customers who cannot write their own spec
• Data migration and what legacy systems actually look like up close
• Building custom agents and connecting them to customer systems
• Governed retrieval, production trust, and blast radius
• Security and compliance as ship blockers, not afterthoughts
• Evaluation the customer will believe
• The FDE career path, and how to run the operating model in-house
Tools mentioned are deliberately thin so the book outlives them. The tools in it will age. The judgment you build will not.
When you read the early release, I want the feedback! Post your take and tag me (Paden Gayle 🦘), I’ll read every one.
Thanks to the O’Reilly team, but a special shoutout to Louise and Ri…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 3w ago
I got into Google with no CS degree or internships. Getting into FDE is easier. Many people just go about it the wrong way.
The default in tech has been: CS degree, internship at a name-brand company, then maybe you get considered for SWE. That works, but it was never the only path. Use me as a walking example with no internships.
The point of this post: why is FDE easier to get into? Because it's hard to hire for. Not like SWE at Google, where a lot of people are chasing the role and the talent pool is also dense. For FDE, even Product Engineering, the gap is different. I'd say it comes down to two things:
1. People don't know the role exists (to which I say HOOOW, but also welcome to my feed 🥳)
2. The intersection of people who are ambiverts or extroverts and also excited about technical topics is small, sometimes veeery small
FDE rewards people who get energized talking to others, figuring out what someone actually needs versus what they said, and getting something real built around that under pressure. That's translation and judgment, not memorized algorithms. It's learnable if someone wants it hard enough, because it's not something you can quiz yourself on and know you've reached understanding. It's a rewiring of small things that starts to affect your daily interactions.
So I'm seeing people from customer success, support, sales engineering, backgrounds nobody thinks of as "technical," landing real traction, because implementation isn't the hard part anymore. Ha…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 5d ago
“How do I become a Forward Deployed Engineer?”
I get this DM every week. So I put my answer into one article.
I’ve made the move myself and sat on both sides of the FDE interview loop. Here’s what I think people should understand before applying:
→ What FDEs actually do
→ How the role differs from SWE and solutions engineering
→ The skills that translate from your current role
→ What to expect in the interview process
If you’re an engineer, PM, TPM, or consultant considering the move, this is a place to start.
♻️ Read the article below, and (Paden Gayle 🦘) for more on the role and what the work actually looks like.
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 9d ago
A post with 242 reactions this week says AI is deleting the junior engineer path. I spent a day trying to argue with it and I couldn't. AWS CEO Matt Garman called firing juniors because AI can do their jobs "the dumbest thing I've ever heard." His reason: "How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything." He's right.
Juniors learn on the boring work. CRUD endpoints. Glue code. "Add a field to the form." Five years of that and you've got a senior.
AI eats the boring work. So the pipeline breaks. That part is true and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
What I can tell you is where some of the work went, because I've been standing in it.
It went into the room with the customer. Figuring out what they actually need (they'll say three things, the real one is a fourth). Deploying into their VPC, their security review, the one guy who owns SSO. Owning it when it breaks on a Friday.
My title for that is Forward Deployed Engineer. Before anyone chases it, the honest version:
- Roughly 70% of my week is context, not code. Stakeholder calls. Docs I didn't write.
- You own outcomes you don't fully control.
- You WILL have to tell a room of directors and CTOs no at some point, sometimes regularly.
- If you want clear priorities and tickets, this role will wear you down fast.
If you got into this to write software, that's a real cost. Some weeks I feel it.
The path isn't deleted. It just doesn't start where it used to.
♻️ Follow if yo…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 2w ago
I genuinely believe the FDE role will be free to enter for the next 1, maybe 2 years from any tech-adjacent seat. After that, real FDE experience won't be a nice-to-have. It'll be the requirement. I want to help close that gap.
I'm saying this out loud because I care about the role. I want everyone who thinks they want in to actually understand what they're signing up for.
It's why I'm writing the book on the role. Why I post about it. Why I run free webinars with O'Reilly and Maven whenever I can. Why I started the Applied AI Engineers community.
For a lot of people, that's enough. For some, it isn't. I keep getting the same ask: "can we work on this 1:1."
So here's my answer.
𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗱 𝗔𝗜 𝗣𝗿𝗼 (𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵).
Let's get you into the role.
Built for engineers, PMs, TPMs, and technical consultants ready to move into FDE or Applied AI. You already have the experience. We make your value clear.
How we work together:
- A 1:1 Backbone Session to map your move
- A proof project built around your interests
- One full mock interview loop with direct feedback
- At least three real recruiter conversations through my intros
- Negotiation help and weekly support through your first 90 days in the role
17 five-star reviews from people I've worked with so far.
Small first group. Working directly with me. Selected for fit.
Being upfront: this isn't for everyone, and my time is capped. I will turn people away if I don't think we can get you where you want to go. T…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 2w ago
Everyone says learn to code and you're safe. I think the safe bet moved, and nobody is teaching the part that actually moved. That's the FDE job. And every piece of it is teachable. Buttt, nobody teaches it because it doesn't fit in a LeetCode grid. So I will 🗣️ !
What the job is actually made of:
1️⃣ Product thinking before the first line
Someone says "we need an AI assistant." The stated ask is almost never the real problem. You find who's in pain, what they do today instead, and what "solved" looks like to them specifically. Skip this and you build the wrong thing fast.
2️⃣ Starting small on purpose
One workflow, one team, one measurable thing. Not the platform. The demo that works on ten documents is not the system that works on ten million, and pretending otherwise is how pilots die.
3️⃣ Deploying means their environment, not yours
Their data, their permissions, their legacy system with the API that rate limits at 50 calls a minute. Deploying is the moment your clean build meets someone else's mess and you own the outcome anyway.
4️⃣ Testing means "does it survive real users"
Not unit tests. Does it hold when a VP pastes in a 40 page PDF and asks a question the docs don't answer. Does it fail loudly or hallucinate politely.
5️⃣ Evals are the whole job in one word
Deciding what "good" means, writing it down, and measuring against it every time you change a prompt or a model. The model will always agree with you. Evals are how you know when it shouldn't have.
6️⃣…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 8d ago
Microsoft reportedly cut its monthly AI spend limit per employee from $100,000 to around $10,000. Everyone's reading it as a model story. Every pilot I've watched die says it's a receipt story.
That's The Information's reporting, and neither Microsoft nor Meta has confirmed any of it.
Microsoft's internal Claude spend was reportedly tracking toward about $1 billion a year. Token usage ate the budgets way faster than anyone projected. Most internal Claude Code licenses reportedly end June 30, with engineers pointed at GitHub Copilot CLI.
Meta, per the same report, limited Claude and Codex for AI-model work over distillation concerns and is steering people to its in-house MetaCode. Claude Code users there reportedly went from about 60,000 to about 30,000, partly from layoffs.
Nowhere in any of that does anyone say the model got worse.
The HN thread under the news is the same story at a smaller scale. One engineering lead tracks token spend against tickets shipped, and a dev burned over $2,000 in a month on the biggest model with almost nothing to show for it. Another person just said "my company took away my Claude because it's too expensive."
Imagine a customer with a 300-person engineering org. The pilot crushes. Leadership buys seats for everyone. Month three, finance pulls the usage report and the top 5% of users are 60% of the bill, and nobody can connect that to a single shipped thing.
That's where pilots die. Not in the demo. In the invoice review with no column fo…
Paden Gayle 🦘
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 2d ago
A founder owns the outcome and picks the constraints. I own the outcome and inherit them. That’s the whole FDE trade.
Here’s what inheriting looks like on a Tuesday.
Imagine a customer where the pilot has to ship in six weeks. Security review eats three of them and I didn’t pick the reviewer. Four stakeholders, two of whom want opposite things, and I didn’t hire any of them.
If the pilot dies, it dies with my name on it.
🎯 What you get
- Founder-grade ownership, and someone else already paid for the runway.
- Reps. A founder gets one company. I get a new one every few months. (This is the part I love, ngl.)
⚡ What it costs
- You never get to say “we’ll rebuild that later.” Their stack is the stack.
- Your best idea loses to their deadline. Every time.
- When it works, their logo gets the win. You get the next deployment.
That trade is why chapter one of the book is called “The Founder Inside Someone Else’s Company.” Took me longer than it should’ve to read that as a title and not a complaint.
♻️ Follow if you want more of this, or DM me if you have questions about the role.
