Forward Deployed Engineer
An engineer who works with a customer or business team to turn AI models into systems that run in their environment.
The role sits between product engineering and consulting: building integrations, agents and tools on the customer’s data and systems, shipping in small steps the team can try, and measuring results in production. AI companies and AI teams inside larger firms hire for it because most of the work is connecting a model to what a business already runs.
Related terms
- AI agent: A model that decides its next step itself, calls tools and repeats until the task is done.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open protocol for plugging tools and data into AI apps: write a server once, use it from any client.
- Evals: A repeatable test set that scores an AI feature, so changes can be measured instead of guessed.
