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Forward Deployed Engineering — Ramp Builders Blog

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"Forward-deployed engineers have become one of the most strategic assets in enterprise AI companies" - Foundation Capital "2025: The Year Of The Forward-Deployed Software Engineer" - Crunchbase, Felicis Ventures The future of B2B software will belong to teams that can integrate faster, customize deeper, and learn directly from customers — that's why FDE is exploding. This post covers the history of the role, lessons from starting and scaling FDE at Ramp, and advice for those building customer-facing engineering teams. Palantir famously created the role after its founding in 2003 for software engineers literally deployed at military sites and customer offices. This allowed engineers to work extremely closely with customers, understand their problems, and iterate quickly. For over 10 years, it was niche and specific to Palantir, but in the late 2010s it started to proliferate. Scale AI and C3.ai adopted the exact same title, and Databricks and Snowflake built similar functions. These com

August 5, 2025 Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) has become the hottest new role in tech 🔥 "Why the Forward Deployed Engineer Is the Hottest Job in Startups" - a16z "Forward-deployed engineers have become one of the most strategic assets in enterprise AI companies" - Foundation Capital The future of B2B software will belong to teams that can integrate faster, customize deeper, and learn directly from customers — that's why FDE is exploding. This post covers the history of the role, lessons from starting and scaling FDE at Ramp, and advice for those building customer-facing engineering…

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