The Dirty Secret of Forward Deployed Engineering — Natalie Meurer, Sierra

[music] >> Thanks guys for coming. I know right after lunch, this is like prime time like sleepiness. I'm curious just to get a sense for the audience. Who here is a forward deployed engineer? Okay, who here is hiring for a deployed engineers? Okay, helpful. Anyone else in between? You can raise your hand just like if if I didn't cover it. Okay. I see you. Double double hand raise. Um well, I'm Natalie Mier. I am the um head of agent engineering at Sierra. I've been at the company about 2 years. I'll tell you a little bit about that. But honestly, I'm here to talk about forward deployed engineering. So, we're actually going to spend a little bit less time talking about Sierra and a lot more time talking about the history of forward deployed engineering and and the dirty secret, I like to call it, of the domain. And you all can tell me how controversial it is. So, um just a little bit about me, which will give you a sense for sort of how I'm coming at this domain, at the whole domain of forward deployed engineering. I actually started off as a policy nerd. So, I was at Georgetown. Um I studied uh in the School of Foreign Service there. And so, I was obsessed with basically tech policy. I um learned to code and then swindled my way or earned my way, depending upon your perspective, into a job at Palantir, where I spent 2016 to 2021. And um there I worked on the privacy team and I was a an infrastructure engineer and also a forward deployed engineer with law enforcement and defense primarily. So, I I've seen forward deployed engineering up close and I'm going to talk a lot about the history of not just my time at Palantir, but actually the time that predated me to talk about basically the origins of the entire discipline. And then I actually wanted to get a business degree of all things, so I went to Stanford. And now I'm at Sierra from 24 to to 26. And one of the things that I think is is quite interesting and when I started at Sierra, actually a little known fact is that I joined the deployment team. and at the time I hated the name. I I thought this is not what we're doing and B it sort of is a nonsensical name so to speak and so I actually wrote an an article in July of 2024, so about 6 months after I started, um about 2 years ago now, on this concept of the agent engineer. And the idea was that agent engineering was actually a subdiscipline of AI engineering which we're of course here to talk about. And the vision was that agent engineering had the same level of customer accountability as forward deployed engineering but was actually a domain onto itself. And I think since then, you know, in the past 2 years we've actually seen a lot of folks talking about agent engineering as a discipline and now we're actually seeing harness engineering as sort of a new discipline sort of is almost a subset of agent engineering. And so if you're confused, that's sort of what this talk is about. And so the dirty secret of forward deployed engineering, I won't make you wait until the end, is it doesn't exist. It is a term that it is meant to describe so many things that it sort of means nothing at this point. But nonetheless, it's sort of the hottest job in AI. And so what I hope to convince you of over the next, let's say, 15 minutes is A that this is true and B that this doesn't matter. And so um I'm going to dive in and we're going to start with tracing the history of forward deployed engineering from Palantir. So we're going to start in 2008. We're going to basically come back to the present and then I'll share with you at least my perspective on what forward deployed engineering is today, why you should want to or not want to be a forward deployed engineer, and why we're actually all forward deployed engineers in the end. Um so first off, I I'd actually like to start in 2016 and then we'll go a little back in time. And I actually pulled basically Palantir job postings in 2016. This is when I started and what drew me into Palantir was effectively this concept of a forward deployed software engineer and this was an emphasis on the forward deployed part. I mean, they're leading. These days you lead with, you know, you speak a certain language, you have these skill sets. They were leading with location. And there's a reason for that that we'll get to, but but forward-deployed literally meant sitting with customers, being on the ground. And in part, as we'll talk about, this was because so much of Palantir's um ecosystem was on-prem deployments. And so, when we think of forward-deployed engineering though, we kind of think of this. And so, um this is sort of the prototypical forward-deployed engineer right out of college um parachuting out of a helicopter um and of course, you know, fixing some sort of runtime issue um in the air. But in practice, forward-deployed engineering actually started as something more akin to DevOps. And so, platform stability really constituted the bulk of the job early on. And so, when you think about um what forward-deployed engineering actually was, don't worry about understanding this code on the right, but it just gives you a sense for what what folks were actually doing. In fact, my onboarding project at Palantir was actually deploy the software on an EC2 instance. And so, that was literally the job. And it was a a large part of the job, and so much so that um basically the job felt like this, which is basically an email from the customer telling you that someone mistakenly unplugged um the instance again. Hey, could you look into it? By the way, it's 2:00 a.m. and you need to go in. Um and so, in practice, a lot of the early forward-deployed engineering was was really focused on DevOps. And come 2012, the the Palantir platform got a lot more stable. And Palantir built data integration software. So, quick show of hands, everyone here probably knows, but who here knows what data integration software is? Great. Anyone think data integration software is really useful without data? Okay. Oh, okay. One All right. I'm curious to hear your take after. Um So, um so I like to think of data integration software without integrated data as a movie theater that's playing nothing. It's like, why show up, you know? And so, this is basically what Palantir was selling without forward deployed engineers. A, the movie theater wasn't standing in 2008. By 2012, you actually don't have data in it, right? You don't have movies playing. And so, you sort of have this basic, um you know, comic explaining this this process, which is, "Hey, great. We have this data integration software, isn't it useful?" Right, but my data's in 20 places, and now you actually have a forward deployed engineer that needs to go in and integrate that data. And most of this was written in, you know, variants of Java back in the day. Um as was actually Palantir's client, fun fact, in Java Swing, if anyone here has had the privilege to to use that. Um So, so basically, forward deployed engineers now have this dual role, right? DevOps plus data integration. And so, they wanted to to deeply understand the customer's environment to to model that data appropriately. And what Palantir uh did then and now still does call an ontology, which is sort of a famous Palantir um term of art. But you can think of it as a taxonomy for that data. And then 2016 rolled around, and you have custom solutions. So, folks are building effectively solutions to known problems. Um and usually that took the form of a Slate dashboard. Has anyone here heard of Slate? This was sort of an internal Okay. All right. Um so, Slate was basically um a drag-and-drop builder. It actually still exists as part of Palantir's platform. It allowed you to map, similar to Retool actually, um map components on the page to data sources. So, now you have the data, and then the question became, "Okay, how do we make it useful?" And the the person or the individual or the group that was most well situated to make that data useful was the the individuals that most understood that data, which were the forward deployed engineers. And so, um the this basically era of of Slate actually gave way to an era of Foundry, which is Palantir's main platform today. And the era of Foundry was effectively all about um making data useful. So, Palantir had this phrase of uh going from data to decision-making, which was was sort of the core problem. One of the things they found, a spoiler alert for anyone building a dashboarding platform, is that a dashboard that doesn't write back to the data source isn't that useful. That these things would decay over time and actually not be as useful as they could be. Fast forward to 2020, you know, Palantir is on the verge of IPO. And they also need a solution that doesn't involve shipping people out to Finland or Canberra or choose the kind of location on the earlier slide of your preference. And um they actually wanted to empower customers to do more of this work themselves. And so, this is where Palantir really started to become a platform. And the job of forward deployed engineering still involved the first three, but it also involved enablement of those customers. So, if you look at the work that Palantir's done with Airbus, for example, in Skywise, that was focused on enabling thousands of Airbus engineers on the Foundry platform to do work of the forward deployed engineer. And these days, they actually have a platform uh since I left called AIFTE that's focused on leveraging uh large language models to do similar work. So, this is the timeline, and you'll see that it's not one thing. And so, this is a a picture of uh Alex Karp, and I think we might have lost the photo um over over here, but of Alex Karp basically running an AIP bootcamp. So, this is basically where the forward deployed engineers or the deployment strategists would go in and actually teach customers to use the software. So, what's interesting about this is these weren't discrete eras, right? The total FTE jobs to be done actually increased over time. Maybe they peaked at one point, but they actually grew over time. And so, now we have a world come 2020, 2024 where the role of FDE sort of doesn't mean anything quite yet or it means everything, right? It's actually the best training ground for generalists. And in fact, this is why I would say that Palantir has seen such success Palantir alums founding companies is because it's actually training you on all of these different facets of the role. And so I have an idea that I like to think of that you all can ask your next candidate if you're interviewing for for engineering role. Which is what vintage of FDE are you? Are you the 2008 vintage of platform stability with hints of panic. 2012, 2016 2020 or even you know today. What is what is the forward deployed engineer of today? And so that I like to call this the FDE vintage and you might debate the years and debate the details, but just like fine wine, I think there's a particular vintage of an FDE. So welcome to 2026. Here we are and FDE is absolutely everywhere. So I'm sure you all have heard Google recently announced with GCP an effort to hire customer engineers or FDEs. Open AI created a new unit with a massive investment to aid the corporate AI push. You have folks like Aaron Levie basically posting on X as as well as many others about just how important this work is today. But if you think as about what we just saw, the work isn't one thing, right? So forward deployed engineering is actually many things all at once. And in fact, today if you look at basically what it takes to be a forward deployed engineer, you were to combine all the job postings into one, you'd probably see something like this. You know, I don't know how many of you have been a staff eng for eight years with six years of direct sales experience and four years as a solution architect. Also, I don't know if you've taught in schools prior because that would help as well. And this is actually what it feels like hiring for these deployed roles as I've done for the past, you know, 2 years, 2 and 1/2 years or so. Um, but this is actually what's being asked of forward deployed engineers today. And so you think about the the dirty secret that it doesn't exist and actually it it either doesn't exist or maybe it actually exists too much. Hard to say. Um, and part of this, I think, and part of sort of um, I think the importance of the role is that across all of those different aspects of the role, the one continuity point is that you actually have every single forward deployed engineer accountable to the customer, whether that be for devops, for enablement, whether that be for custom solutioning, data integration. These are all forms of solutions or customer accountability. And when that happens though, I I ask the question, you know, what happens to engineering broadly, even outside of forward deployed engineering, when code becomes cheap to produce? When it becomes really quick to fire off a prompt to a background agent and get something pretty great on the other end. And one way to think about this is forward deployed engineers being accountable to customers and trying to translate that signal into the product, either to make it more stable or to drive more data integration. And so what this allows you to do as a forward deployed engineer today is actually be way more impactful in product development. So forward deployed engineers can now not just talk to customers, not just prototype, but actually build end-to-end solutions with coding agents. But I think something more interesting is happening that we're seeing at Sierra, which is actually the lines are blurring. So product engineering is also becoming more client-facing. And so if you're a good product engineer, if you're a good forward deployed engineer, you should be thinking about the product and the customer both together. And so one of the reasons that folks are talking about forward deployed engineering as so essential to where we are at this point in time is that it's actually converging. Forward-deployed engineering is in some ways actually getting larger than we ever thought it was before. So, it's actually stacking more skills on top. And if you're a product engineer, even an infra engineer, you should also be thinking about DevOps, right? How do you actually deploy the software? And then separately, a different shift is changing when code becomes cheap. And this is actually from um both Emergence Capital and then a a blog post from someone on on our team, our head of go-to-market ops, Elliot Greenwald. And the way that we sell software is changing. And at Sierra, we've always been focused on this outcome-based pricing model. We think that you should pay a software platform for the value that that software delivers. And this is not always possible. So, if you think about uh scenarios where basically you can only slightly attribute the outcome to the product, think of seat-based pricing. This is basically the way that software has been priced for uh an incredibly long time. And then you think about the agency and the autonomy to achieve the outcome. And agents basically move us up into the right here. So, usage-based, a good example of that might actually be what we pay to OpenAI or Anthropic or some of the foundation model providers. Because it's it's based on usage and it's hard to actually attribute the outcome. When you think about customer experience in AI, that's outcome-based. It's are you actually making a sale? Are you solving a customer's inquiry? And we think basically that most of pricing in this market will move to outcome-based. So, if you have both of these things, you have forward-deployed engineers that can now contribute to the product, you have more outcome-based pricing, how do you actually guarantee the outcome? And that really is forward-deployed engineering. And so, if I jump here uh back to sort of where I started, this is how I envision agent engineering in in 2024. And I I don't know if I was wrong or you guys can tell me if I was wrong, but it wasn't the whole story. Right? That agent engineering actually was a subset heavily focused on outcomes. It is a flavor of forward deployed engineering. But these days, I'm actually of a different mind, which is that um really in some ways everything is forward deployed engineering, or at least everything is trending that way. Product engineering, agent engineering, AI engineering, solutions engineering, and customer engineering. When you think about enablement, you think about devops, you think about solution building, data integration, building an agent, deploying it into production. These are things that are on behalf of customers at the end of the day. And we should be pricing outcomes associated with them. And forward deployed engineering as a concept, even if it is one, sort of lacks a coherent definition, is something that actually allows us to enable those outcomes. So, I'll leave you with um maybe one last note, which is that forward deployed engineering is dead. And long live forward deployed engineering. So, thank you so much. And by the way, we're hiring across forward deployed engineering roles uh at Sierra. So, I told you it wouldn't be about Sierra, but if you want to talk about FDE, I'm here. Thanks, guys. >> [applause] [music]