This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kanav Bhatnagar, 24, a forward-deployed engineer at Rippling, an HR tech company, who lives and works in New York City. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I got into software development because I wanted to build cool stuff.
Amazon hired me as a software engineer out of college, and it was a big learning opportunity, teaching me the fundamentals of engineering.
But it was a behemoth of a company, and I eventually wanted to work in a smaller environment where I could take more personal ownership over product decisions and learn more on the job.
After 2 ½ years at Amazon, I interviewed at a sales startup called Actively AI, where I landed a role in forward-deployed engineering.
The “FDE” role was popularized by Palantir, and it has been described as the “hottest role in AI.” I liked that it combined software engineering with understanding business.
I spent roughly six months at Actively AI before I joined the AI-forward HR tech company Rippling as a senior FDE, in October 2025.
I’ve now been an FDE for roughly a year. Put simply, I’m a customer-facing engineer who tailors our product to each client. They describe their challenges and needs, and I build solutions and customizations.
Here’s what my day-to-day is like, and the skills you need to break into this role.
My primary job is listening to customers. The results are very rewarding.
Software engineers can feel far removed from customers, because they often can’t see their impact. In this job, I’m closer to the front lines.
A core software engineer can build something that serves the majority of use cases, but AI tools usually need more customization to work properly than regular software features. That’s when an FDE steps in.
For example, a restaurant chain might have a labor-intensive process for tracking their payroll data that involves spreadsheets and manual data entry, which I’d help them to eliminate within Rippling’s platform by using custom code and AI.
My primary job is listening to customers and understanding their problems, which was a learning curve for me, coming from a software engineering background. On a day-to-day basis, I’m in a lot of customer meetings, including visiting businesses who use our product to talk with employees about their experience with it. I probably spend an equal amount of time coding solutions and interacting with our core product teams.
Context-switching is an important skill to master in this job, where you could go from talking to a customer to debugging something to jumping onto another customer call shortly after.
I don’t rely on an engineer to code something for me. I make a lot of decisions about the shape of the product and how to execute on it, which I really enjoy. It’s very rewarding when a customer looks at what I’ve built after multiple iterations and says, “This is exactly what I wanted.”
Technical and communication skills are equally important as an FDE
I think it would be pretty hard, although not impossible, to become an FDE without a technical background. With the dawn of vibe coding, it might become easier, though.
In my experience, FDE interviews feature technical rounds that test your coding skills, like in traditional software engineering interviews. You also have to show you can talk with any customer, including non-technical people, by asking the right questions to understand a customer’s problem, and talk through how you’d design the solution.
To prepare for interviews, I have used consulting industry interview questions, which require you to explain how you’d meet client requests. I think both fields overlap, requiring rapid diagnosis, clarifying questions, and a clear plan of action.
There’s probably more breadth than depth of technical knowledge required. In today’s age of rapidly evolving technology, I try to spend time outside of work understanding what’s new in the AI world and what new AI tools I can be using in my workflow by talking to colleagues and researching online.
I think my job is preparing me to be a founder one day
I’m interested in founding my own company one day, and I’ve previously heard someone describing the FDE role as a founder bootcamp. It provides a good foundational layer for entrepreneurship, helping you understand how a business functions from the sales process to how to build things.
The FDE role is evolving and no one really knows what direction it’s heading in. Even if AI turns out to be unprofitable, I think FDEs will still have a place because of the demand for customer software. Products are becoming easier to build, and people in this role will be needed to handle large contracts with clients.
Palantir is an example of a company that’s had FDEs since the 2010s, even before AI was mainstream.
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