forward deployed engineer (FDE) An individual who helps an org get the most out of AI capabilities by identifying where that org uses intelligence, then delivering on the AI promise; they (1) audit to see how to rebuild from the ground up around a particular product or AI; (2) then leverage evaluations to make sure the automation/AI-use will be as good as humans (better, not worse); and (3) deploy that so the systems are real and stay good. To do this, they must be a superstar at the intersection of communication, intelligence, product, engineering, and AI, with as strong bent toward effective and acceptable, diplomatic pragmatism, while effectively selling what they are doing based on their own inescapably honest scrutiny and quickly grokable value props. That forward deployed engineer (FDE) does what one would imagine would have taken a team of 2-5 in the past, but at a fraction of what such a team would cost today; and doing something that would be hard to pull off efficiently with a team much larger than that, while delivering such a thing and in such in a way that would have been nearly impossible a few years ago, before AI; I guess that's why we hired them.