Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer
Half engineer, half field operator. The hardest hybrid to hire, and the one every AI company now needs.
Why the FDE search breaks normal pipelines
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
A forward deployed engineer writes production code and sits in the customer's office while doing it. They scope the integration, absorb the customer's mess, ship something that works by Friday, and come back with what the product should have done instead. It is a genuinely hybrid job and the people who can do it are rare.
Standard filters cannot find them. Search for engineers and you get people who have never presented to a customer. Search for solutions or implementation titles and you get people who cannot ship. The signal you want is in the overlap, and overlap is exactly what keyword search destroys.
The title is also new. Many of the strongest candidates have never held it: they were the engineer who kept ending up on customer calls, or the solutions architect who started writing the patches themselves. Filtering on the words rules them out.
How the agent runs a forward deployed engineer search
It looks for the overlap, not the title
Engineers whose commits sit alongside customer integration work, conference talks about deployment war stories, postmortems written for an external audience. Evidence of both halves.
It reads for the field half
Writing that explains a technical decision to a non-engineer is the clearest signal someone can do this job, and it almost never appears on a profile.
Outreach that names the actual job
Strong FDE candidates have been burned by roles that turned out to be support. The message says what the deployments look like, who the customers are and how much of the week is code.
Screening on the failure mode
Your screening questions go out in the first thread: how they handled a customer whose data was nothing like the demo, and what they pushed back into the product.
Questions.
Answered.
Yes. A solutions engineer usually supports the sale. A forward deployed engineer usually owns the delivery: they write and ship the code that makes the customer's deployment work.
Often not, and insisting on it shrinks the pool sharply. The best candidates are frequently engineers who kept ending up in customer rooms, which the agent can find from their writing and talks.
Through evidence rather than claims: public writing aimed at non-engineers, conference talks, documentation they authored. Then your screening questions in the first exchange.
Comp usually sits above a standard senior engineering band because the role is scarce and hybrid. We will share what candidates in your market are telling us during intake.
Hire a Solutions Engineer
The person who turns a sceptical technical buyer into a signed deal.
Hire a GTM Engineer
The role that replaced hiring three SDRs, and the reason your first revenue hire might be an engineer.
Superposition for AI Startups
Hire builders who ship AI products, not resume keyword-stuffers.
Find your forward deployed engineer.
Tell us what your deployments look like and the agent will show you who it would write to first.