FDE

Not sales, not support. You sit with the customer, understand their mess and build the solution inside their house. The product sells by working, not by being explained.

Forward Deployed Engineer

What you actually do

Build in front of the customer

The model started at Palantir and AI companies adopted it because their product does not sell with a canned demo. It has to connect to each customer's data and workflow. Hotels are the same: the PMS, the channel manager and the rate structure of every chain are their own world.
Translate between two languages

You talk to the hotel's operations director in the morning and to your own product team in the afternoon. The value is in both conversations ending up in the same place.
Close on outcome, not on licence

Your pitch is an integration already running on their data. It is the hardest way to prepare a sale and the hardest one to argue with.
Feed learning back to product

You are the one who actually sees where the product breaks in the real world. If that does not go back in an organised way, it is lost.

Where this role goes

FDE is the fastest growing commercial profile in AI because it combines technical judgement with customer contact, which is exactly what is scarce. From here people move into leading a solutions team, into product, or into go to market, because you end up understanding the customer's business better than almost anyone inside your own company.

What to learn before you take it

Say no to an integration that cannot be maintained
Document what you build so it does not depend on you
Put a price on your time, which is the real cost of this model

See the Go to Market role

You do not learn this by reading

Everything above is notes. The jump happens by talking to people who already made it, and that is what the community is for. It is free and we meet in person.

Join free

The whole path

SDR

Opens the doors and books the first meetings

See

Account Executive

Runs the full process through to signature

See

BDM

Opens new markets, channels and partnerships

See

Sales Manager

Makes the team sell instead of selling

See

Sales Director

Designs the commercial system and owns the number

See

Go to Market

Puts sales, marketing and product into one play

See

Founder sales

Selling when there is no sales team yet

See