About
What this site is
A field guide to a job that did not have one. The forward deployed engineer role has spread quickly, and most of what is written about it is either a job posting, a recruiter's summary or a personal essay. All three are useful and none of them tells somebody deciding whether to take the role what the work actually is.
So this site does two things. It explains the role in enough detail to be useful to someone choosing a career, including the parts that are unattractive. And it explains deployment practice to companies buying it, including when not to buy it.
Who publishes it
Radif Partners, which also runs the deployment engagements described in the for companies section. The same people write the guides and do the work, which is both the reason the guides contain things a summary would not and an obvious conflict of interest. How that conflict is handled is set out on the editorial policy page, and the thing to check is whether the editorial pages ever recommend us as the answer. They do not.
How it pays for itself
Through the consulting work, and through nothing else on this site. There are no sponsored posts, no affiliate links, no paid placements and no vendor commission. If you never contact us, the site costs you nothing and shows you nothing you did not come for.
This is worth stating because it explains an editorial choice that would otherwise look strange: several pages here argue against buying what we sell. A company with a strong internal team should build things itself, and a problem that is organisational rather than technical will not be fixed by a deployment engineer. Both statements cost us work and both are true.
What we are not
Not a recruiter and not a job board. We do not place candidates, we take no fee from anyone hiring, and the pages about employers describe categories of company rather than advertisements for particular ones.
Not a salary database. This is the omission people notice, and the reasoning is on the methodology page: the public figures for this title disagree by a factor of four, and we will publish compensation when we maintain data we can show the method for.
Not neutral about the field. We think deployment work is undervalued relative to product engineering and that most organisations underestimate how much of an AI project is not technical. Those are positions rather than facts, and they shape what this site covers.
Getting in touch
Write to contact@fdeinsider.com, or use the contact page. Corrections, disagreements and accounts of the job that differ from what is written here are all genuinely welcome: this is a fast-moving role and a site about it that never changes is wrong.
