Cresta grew its FDE team from 1 to 50+ in a year, and it reports into engineering, not sales

Cresta, which builds AI agents for customer contact centers, says its Forward Deployed Engineering team grew from one person to more than 50 worldwide in twelve months, and that it is still hiring FDEs globally. In a post on the company blog, head of FDE Jove Zhong describes the team's model, which works with customers such as Brinks, Snap Finance and Alaska Airlines.

The key structural choice is that Cresta's FDEs sit in the Product Engineering org rather than in go-to-market, customer success or professional services. That lets them open pull requests against the product directly, so patterns they see across customers become reusable skills, connectors and evaluation sets on the shared platform. Zhong says some FDEs have gone on to build new products, including Cresta Conductor and the Cresta CLI.

Day to day, most deployments go from kickoff to production in one to three months, and Cresta says it never ships without evals. Customer trips rarely run longer than about five days and are timed around discovery and launch; the rest of the work is remote. An FDE typically runs two to four projects at once, with two or three FDEs per project.

For job seekers, the hiring bar is notable: Cresta hires experienced FDEs and interviews for judgment rather than raw coding, asking about real production incidents and how candidates handled feature requests they disagreed with. Vertical knowledge and the maturity to say no to a customer without losing the relationship are what it looks for.