Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are technical staff embedded with high-ticket B2B customers to solve integration problems, provide support, and gather product insights. Unlike traditional consultants, FDEs have organizational accountability and bring learnings back to improve the product itself. The author, founder of Tinybird, argues FDEs are essential for B2B companies selling to large enterprises.
Software engineering relies on collaboration across design, code review, and team practices, but AI coding agents are disrupting these norms by replacing peer discussion with direct agent interaction, bypassing design processes, and creating product requirement bottlenecks as engineering capacity accelerates beyond product management's ability to specify work.