Essay: being on-site doesn't make you an FDE, a "return path" to the product team does

Ascendient Learning published an essay on October 30 by Vijay Kasibhatla arguing that sitting at a customer's site is not what defines a forward deployed engineer. His test is whether there is a "return path": a named product team that receives the engineer's field findings on a regular schedule and turns repeated problems into product. Without one, he calls the role a delivery engineer, skilled and useful but a different job. He is explicit that this distinction is his own definition, not an industry standard.

He read five FDE postings from Palantir, OpenAI (two), Anthropic and Databricks on October 18. All five describe working embedded with customers, and four say findings go back to product or engineering, but none states a schedule for it, so, he argues, a job ad alone can't tell you which job you are getting. He also draws on Palantir's Dev versus Delta split and accounts from Nabeel Qureshi and Gergely Orosz of field work flowing back into product.

The essay proposes two tests (does the engineer write production code in the customer's environment, and do findings reach a product team regularly) and four questions for leaders before posting an FDE role, including how many days pass between a field finding and a product decision.

Why it matters for FDEs: the essay suggests candidates ask in interviews which product team received the last finding an engineer in the role sent back and what it did with it. A specific answer is a good sign the role is real FDE work rather than services work under a new title.