Forward Deployed Engineer: The Complete Crash Course

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is one of the fastest-growing roles in tech. Palantir created it in the early 2010s (internally called "Delta"), and today OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, Ramp, Databricks and Salesforce all hire for it. According to Lightcast data reported by Paraform, US FDE postings went from about 200 in 2024 to more than 5,200 in just the first seven months of 2026.

This free, practical crash course explains exactly what an FDE does and how to become one, and then has you do the job. You will play the FDE for a fictional customer, Acme Logistics, and take a real project from kickoff email to shipped software: write a one-page scope doc, generate and explore 500 support tickets with pandas, build retrieval that finds the right tickets, wrap it in a FastAPI endpoint that cites its sources, add a Streamlit UI, measure it with 15 golden-question evals, use a failing eval to drive a real v1 fix (93% → 100%), package it with Docker, and hand it off with an impact summary and product-feedback note. Everything runs locally: no paid API keys and no accounts needed.

You also get a 6-month roadmap with two tracks (beginner and existing developer) built on free resources, resume and portfolio advice, where to find roles, a walkthrough of the FDE interview loop including the famous decomposition round with a full mock answer, and a dated, sourced look at employer-posted pay bands.

All facts and salary figures are cited on screen and were checked in October 2026. The course uses AI-generated narration; all demos are real code and real output recorded on a real machine. Not affiliated with any company mentioned.