Before You Hire an FDE, Work Out What’s Holding You Back

November 6, 2026

If an AI project isn’t getting into production, hiring another engineer might help.
But what if the thing holding it back is an unclear product brief? Or nobody agreeing what “reliable enough” means? Or a security concern that only comes up when the business is ready to launch?
Those are different problems. They should lead to different hiring decisions.
I read a thoughtful post recently about AI transformation which argued that the FDE role is overrated and the deployment strategist role is underrated.
I’m not convinced that’s quite the distinction I’d make.
The question for me is whether companies understand what they’re asking either person to own.

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What does your FDE actually need to do?

Forward Deployed Engineer sounds like a reasonably specific job title.
You might expect someone who can work closely with customers, understand their problems and build software that solves them.
But take that into an AI deployment and the brief can become much broader.
Does this person need to identify the right use case? Challenge the customer’s requirements? Build the integrations? Design evaluations? Explain limitations to senior stakeholders? Help change how a team works?
There are people who can cover a lot of that ground. The difficulty is deciding where they need real depth, where working knowledge is enough, and where someone else needs to take responsibility.
“Good technically and good with people” doesn’t get you very far into that conversation.

Start with the work that needs doing

Before writing the job description, I’d want to understand where the project is getting stuck.
If the use case is clear and the challenge is building dependable integrations, that points towards one profile.
If the team is technically strong but struggling to establish what the customer actually needs, that points towards another.
If nobody can agree who approves deployment or what evidence they need, I’d question whether another engineering hire solves the immediate problem at all.
That conversation matters particularly in a smaller business, where it’s tempting to put every uncovered responsibility into the next vacancy.
You can hire someone with broad experience. You still need to give them a clear remit and people around them who own the other decisions.

Be specific about the trade-offs

For me, this is where a useful recruitment brief starts. What must this person have done before? What can they learn? Which decisions can they make? Who will they need support from? A strong engineer who needs help navigating governance may be exactly the right hire if that support exists. Someone with more customer and product experience may be more valuable if the engineering capability is already there. Neither is automatically the better candidate. Before asking, “Where can we find a good FDE?”, I’d ask: “What do we need this person to get moving, and what will we put around them to make that possible?