This told essay is based on a conversation with Kanav Bhatnagar, 24, a forward deployment engineer in New York City who lives in New York City and is a forward deployment engineer at HR technology company Rippling. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started software development because I wanted to create something cool.
Amazon hired me as a software engineer after college. This was a great learning opportunity that taught me the basics of engineering.
But it was a huge company, and I ultimately wanted to work in a smaller environment where I could have more personal responsibility for product decisions and learn more on the job.
After two and a half years at Amazon, I interviewed at a sales startup called Actively AI, where I landed a forward-looking engineering role.
of ”The “FDE” role was popularized by Palantir and has been described as “the hottest role in AI.” I liked the combination of software engineering and business understanding.
I worked at Actively AI for about 6 months before joining Rippling, an AI-advanced HR technology company, as a Senior FDE in October 2025.
I’ve been an FDE for about a year now. Simply put, I’m a customer-facing engineer who tailors products to each client. They describe their challenges and needs and I build solutions and customizations.
Here’s how my day goes and the skills needed to get into this role.
My main job is to listen to our customers. The results are very rewarding.
Software engineers can feel distant from their customers because their influence is often hard to see. This job is close to the front line.
While core software engineers can build something for most use cases, AI tools typically require more customization than regular software functionality to work properly. That’s when FDE intervenes.
For example, a restaurant chain may have a labor-intensive process involving spreadsheets and manual data entry to track payroll data, which I help eliminate within Rippling’s platform using custom code and AI.
My main job is to listen to customers and understand their problems, but coming from a software engineering background, this was a learning curve for me. I participate in many customer meetings every day, including visiting companies that use our products and speaking with employees about their experiences. I probably spend the same amount of time coding the solution and interacting with the core product team.
Bhatnagar said that as an FDE, he spends a lot of time interacting with customers. Courtesy of Kanavu Bhatnagar
Context switching is an important skill to master in this job. You can debug something from a conversation with a customer and then immediately switch to a call from another customer.
I don’t ask engineers to code anything. I make a lot of decisions about the shape of the product and how to execute it, which is really fun. It’s very rewarding when a customer looks at something I’ve created over and over again and says, “This is exactly what I wanted.”
Technical and communication skills are just as important as FDE
I think it’s quite difficult, if not impossible, to become an FDE without a technical background. However, with the dawn of vibe coding, it may become easier.
In my experience, FDE interviews are technical interviews that test your coding skills, similar to traditional software engineering interviews. You also need to demonstrate that you can have conversations with any customer, including non-technical ones, by asking the right questions to understand their problems and discussing how to design a solution.
To prepare for the interview, I used consulting industry interview questions that require you to explain how you meet client requests. I believe that both fields overlap and require rapid diagnosis, clarification of questions, and a clear plan of action.
Perhaps more breadth than depth of technical knowledge is required. In today’s era of rapidly evolving technology, I try to spend time outside of work to understand the latest in the world of AI and new AI tools that can be used in my workflow, by talking to colleagues and researching online.
I think my job is preparing me to become a founder someday.
I’m interested in starting my own company someday. I once heard someone describe the FDE role as a founder bootcamp. This provides a good foundational layer for entrepreneurship and helps you understand how businesses work from the sales process to how things are built.
Bhatnagar believes that FDE’s role will continue. Courtesy of Kanavu Bhatnagar
The role of FDE is evolving, and no one knows what direction it will take. Even if AI turns out to be unprofitable, I think there’s still a place for FDE because of customer demand for the software. Building products will become easier and more likely, and people in this role will be needed to handle large contracts with clients.
Palantir is an example of a company that has been implementing FDE since the 2010s, before AI became mainstream.