Forward Deployed Engineer Hiring Kit: Job Description, Scorecard, 30/60/90 Plan and Career Ladder

Everything an engineering leader needs to hire forward deployed engineers, in the open: a job description built from what current postings ask for, an interview scorecard weighted toward the decomposition round, a 30/60/90-day onboarding plan and a five-level career ladder. Copy any block, edit it for your company and use it. Equivalent kits elsewhere sit behind paywalls; this one is free.

Job description template

Built from the responsibilities and requirements in current FDE postings at AI labs, clouds and startups¹². Replace the bracketed fields.

Forward Deployed Engineer - [Team]
Location: [City / hybrid N days / remote]  Travel: up to [N]%
Base pay: $[low] - $[high] plus [equity/bonus]

What you will do
- Run technical discovery with customers and agree success criteria
- Scope how our product fits the customer's systems and design the integration
- Write production code: integrations, data pipelines, retrieval and agent workflows
- Build evaluation suites and take systems from staging to production
- Be the customer's primary technical contact, including production debugging
- Feed friction, gaps and feature requests back to product and research

What you bring
- [N]+ years shipping production software, ideally customer-facing
- Strong Python, plus JavaScript or TypeScript and SQL
- Hands-on work with LLM applications: retrieval, agents, evaluations
- Experience with a cloud platform (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud)
- Comfort decomposing ambiguous problems and explaining them to executives
- Willingness to travel up to [N]%

Interview scorecard

Score each dimension 1 to 4 after the loop. The decomposition and customer dimensions carry the most weight because published guides report that the case round decides most outcomes³.

Dimension	Weight	Strong signal
Problem decomposition	25%	Clarifies the goal, asks about data, ships something in week one
Coding	20%	Working, readable code; handles edge cases; extends cleanly
Customer communication	20%	Explains technical ideas plainly; pushes back with an alternative
Applied AI and data	15%	Knows retrieval, evaluations and cost trade-offs from real work
System design	10%	Sound data flow, security and rollout plan
Ownership and values	10%	Owns outcomes in production; honest about failures

Sample questions for each round are in the interview guide.

30/60/90-day onboarding plan

Adapted from a published FDE onboarding plan⁴.

Days 1-30: learn
- Install the product end to end and log every friction point
- Map the reference architecture; shadow customer calls
- Merge one small fix through the full release path

Days 31-60: own
- Take a bounded customer workstream; run discovery
- Agree success criteria and a fixed test set with the customer
- Build a scoped proof of concept on realistic data
- Write architecture decision records; send weekly updates

Days 61-90: production
- Submit the security review pack
- Turn proof-of-concept tests into an evaluation suite in CI
- Add tracing and alerts; write and rehearse the runbook
- Contribute one reusable asset (connector, template, eval)
- Day-90 review against the month-one success criteria

Career ladder

Levels differ by scope and autonomy more than by duties: every level builds and works with customers.

Level	Scope	Expectation
FDE I	A workstream within one engagement	Ships scoped features with guidance; owns them in production
FDE II	One engagement end to end	Runs discovery, design and delivery for a customer workflow
Senior FDE	Several engagements or one complex account	Sets the technical approach; mentors; turns work into reusable assets
Staff / Principal FDE	A segment, industry or platform area	Shapes product direction from field learning; leads the hardest deployments
FDE Manager / Head of Deployment	A team or the deployment function	Hires, staffs engagements, owns customer outcomes and margins

For pay at each level, see the salary benchmark; for where competitors are hiring, see Who Is Hiring FDEs.

Frequently asked questions

Should we hire FDEs or software engineers?

Hire FDEs when customers need engineers inside their systems to get value from your product. Hire software engineers for the core product. Many companies keep both and rotate people between them.

Should FDE pay include commission?

If you want builders, no: commission pulls the role toward sales engineering. Tie bonuses to customer outcomes such as workflows in production instead.

Can we use this kit commercially?

Yes. Copy and adapt it freely inside your organization.

References

Paraform, "OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineer." paraform.com
Paraform, "How to hire a forward deployed engineer." paraform.com
Perspective AI, "Forward Deployed Engineer Interview Questions: 2026 Prep Guide." getperspective.ai
Cloudsoftsol, "FDE: the first 90 days." cloudsoftsol.com