Atlassian CEO: FDEs are rarely charged for — and they are speeding up core product work at customer sites

Responding to an analyst question on Atlassian’s Forward Deployed Engineer motion on the Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings call (5 November 2026), CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes stressed that “all FDEs are not built the same.” Atlassian’s, he said, are fully qualified AI and ML engineers who write full production customer code and product code at the customer site to help get AI workflows onto the Atlassian platform — not rebadged customer-success staff.

He said the program is “going extremely well” a couple of quarters in, working with many large customers on Teamwork Graph, Forge, connectors and Rovo-related rollout. The stated goal is delivering AI usage and leaving the customer with a trained group who can continue that rollout themselves. “Our goal is not building a service business,” he said; these are “rarely ever charged for.”

For working FDEs, the useful signal is the product loop: Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian is seeing “great speed ups” in its ability to build product with FDEs and is doing “more and more core software engineering at the customer site,” shortening the path from customer request to delivery. He said the company would talk more about accelerating that program in coming quarters. Headcount was not disclosed on the call (prior Atlassian material had pointed to a path toward roughly 100 FDEs).