Mastra makes forward deployed engineering an official offering with Mastra FDE
Mastra, the open-source agent framework, now offers dedicated forward deployed engineers who embed with any team building agents, from a 6-hour-a-week advisory role up to 20-40 hours a week of hands-on building.
On November 10, Mastra introduced Mastra FDE, a forward deployed engineering program open to any team building AI agents. The company says it has long sent its own engineers into early adopters' codebases to get agents into production, and is now turning that into a formal product. It names Salesforce, MongoDB and Workday among the teams that build on Mastra.
Each customer gets a dedicated Mastra FDE embedded with their team from architecture through production, with regular check-ins. Engagements can be consultative (about 6 hours a week) or hands-on (20-40 hours a week), and come with a shared Slack channel with Mastra's founders and engineers, roadmap access, workshops and Mastra Enterprise.
Mastra pitches the program as an alternative to hiring an AI engineer, saying it costs less than one senior AI hire. It follows the 90-day Mastra Launch program announced in October.
Why it matters for FDEs: framework and tooling companies, not just AI labs and enterprise vendors, are now selling FDE time as a standalone product, and positioning it directly against in-house AI engineering hires. That widens the set of employers who need engineers who can both build on a platform and work inside a customer's codebase.
Source: mastra.ai