Building an FDE Team - Why hunting for unicorns won’t scale?

Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to combine a remarkable range of skills.

They need to build and deploy complex AI solutions. They also need to understand customer businesses, navigate ambiguous requirements, communicate with stakeholders and help organizations agree on what should change.

For the people hiring and leading FDE teams, that creates a challenge: how do you find engineers who are technically exceptional and also have the consulting, communication and stakeholder alignment skills needed to work directly with enterprise customers?

Some engineers bring that combination. Others develop it through experience. But as more companies build FDE teams, relying on finding people who already have every skill becomes a difficult hiring strategy.

Perhaps the better question isn't how to find the perfect FDE. It's which capabilities you need to hire for, and which you can deliberately develop.

Why more companies are building FDE teams

Forward Deployed Engineering isn't a new concept. Palantir helped establish the model by placing engineers directly with customers to solve complex operational problems, integrate technology into their environments and build systems that work in practice.

What's changing is how widely the model is being adopted.

As AI companies move from demonstrating what their technology can do to making it work inside large organizations, traditional software delivery models aren't always sufficient. Enterprise AI implementation involves understanding business processes, navigating organizational constraints, working with different stakeholders and often redesigning workflows.

That's why we're seeing FDE roles across several types of organizations.

Frontier AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic need engineers who can help enterprise customers turn powerful models into working applications.

Cloud providers such as AWS are building forward-deployed teams to solve complex customer problems and bring AI solutions into production.

Enterprise software and AI platform companies (such as Salesforce and Databricks) are adopting similar models, particularly when implementation requires deep integration with a customer's systems and operations.

The companies differ in what they sell and how they organize their teams. But the underlying challenge is similar: making advanced technology useful in the messy reality of enterprise operations.

And that requires engineers who can do more than write production code.

Look at what companies expect from FDEs

The job descriptions from major employers reveal just how broad the expectations have become.

Palantir expects Forward Deployed Engineers to work directly with customers on complex operational problems. They engage with people across the organization, understand how the business operates and build solutions that can be deployed in real environments.

OpenAI expects FDEs to scope customer projects, navigate implementation trade-offs, build production systems and help customers adopt AI solutions. The work combines technical engineering with understanding the customer's business and operational needs.

Anthropic emphasizes understanding customer workflows, working across functions and navigating ambiguous requirements to turn AI capabilities into useful applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) expects Forward Deployed Engineers to understand customers' business processes, technical architecture and operational constraints. Its senior roles also involve translating ambiguous business problems into solutions and navigating organizational boundaries.

These descriptions reveal a common pattern. Companies want engineers who can build sophisticated technical solutions while also understanding customer problems, working across organizational boundaries and influencing what gets built.

For an FDE hiring manager, that's quite a list of expectations: technical depth, business understanding, consulting skills, communication, stakeholder management and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

You can look for candidates who demonstrate all these capabilities. But making every one of them a prerequisite can narrow your hiring options.

Even experienced engineers who communicate well with customers may not know how to help a group of stakeholders reach a shared decision. That's a specific capability worth examining.

Understanding stakeholders isn't the same as aligning them

Consider a customer asking your FDE team to build an AI agent to speed up its operations.

The operations lead wants shorter turnaround times. The people doing the work know that many delays happen while waiting for approvals. IT is concerned about integrations. Compliance needs to understand which decisions AI will make and which must stay with a person.

Each perspective is reasonable. None is the whole picture.

Your FDE can interview each stakeholder, understand their requirements and identify the technical constraints. That's valuable work. But understanding the different perspectives doesn't mean the people involved have agreed on a way forward.

Operations might want AI to automate approvals. Compliance might require some approvals to remain human decisions. IT might recommend automating the preparation of information needed for those approvals.

Your engineer can understand all three positions perfectly. The stakeholders still need to decide which workflow they want, who owns each decision and what to change first.

Without a shared decision, the FDE may end up carrying messages between departments, trying to reconcile conflicting expectations and making assumptions about decisions the customer should own.

This is where facilitation becomes valuable.

Facilitation is the ability to design and guide how a group thinks together, drawing on everyone's knowledge and perspectives to reach decisions they collectively own.

Instead of relying on the FDE to gather and reconcile everyone's input separately, the people involved can think through the challenge together, build on each other's ideas and make better-informed decisions.

Requirements gathering helps an FDE understand different perspectives. Facilitation helps the people holding those perspectives reach a shared decision.

For a hiring manager, this distinction matters. You might already assess whether candidates can communicate with customers, ask good questions and gather requirements. But can they help stakeholders work through disagreement, create alignment across departments and draw on the knowledge of the group?

Those capabilities aren't necessarily covered by engineering experience or general communication skills. And they don't have to depend entirely on individual talent.

Hire for technical excellence. Build facilitation capability.

When building an FDE team, it's tempting to look for engineers who already have the complete package: deep technical expertise, business acumen, consulting experience, strong communication skills and the ability to navigate difficult stakeholder situations.

If you find those people, great. But what happens when you need to hire ten, twenty or fifty FDEs? Or when you have excellent engineers who communicate well with customers but haven't developed methods to facilitate complex organizational decisions?

Here's the problem with relying on unicorns: you're making an already demanding hiring process even more restrictive. You may pass over excellent engineers who have the foundations to become strong FDEs but haven't yet developed advanced facilitation skills.

And even when you find people who have the complete package, you haven't solved the problem of how to develop those capabilities in the next ten or twenty engineers you hire.

You end up depending on exceptional individuals instead of building a repeatable way to develop your team.

Prioritize the technical capabilities that are difficult to build, assess whether candidates have the foundations for customer-facing work, and invest in developing their facilitation skills.

That doesn't mean hiring engineers who cannot communicate or collaborate. It means recognizing that facilitation is a professional capability made up of learnable skills: asking useful questions, listening, managing group dynamics, working through disagreement and helping people reach decisions. Those skills can be developed through training and practice, with structured methods providing a repeatable way to apply them.

Experienced FDEs often develop strong consulting instincts over time. They learn when to challenge an assumption, whom to involve and how to handle disagreement between stakeholders. But if every engineer has to learn those lessons independently, your team's effectiveness depends heavily on individual experience.

As FDE teams grow, leaders need a more consistent approach: practical guidance for new engineers, adaptable methods for experienced ones and a shared foundation for problem discovery, stakeholder alignment and workflow redesign.

Making facilitation a repeatable part of the FDE toolkit

Developing facilitation skills doesn't mean turning your engineers into professional facilitators. Facilitation is the capability; methods provide repeatable structures for putting it into practice. For FDEs, those methods can help with situations they already encounter in customer engagements.

How do you bring the right stakeholders together to understand the actual business problem? How do you make different perspectives visible and help people agree on priorities? How do you help a cross-functional group redesign a workflow around AI, rather than simply automate the existing process?

At Design Sprint Academy, we use two methods to develop these capabilities.

AI Problem Framing helps a cross-functional group examine the business problem behind an AI request, challenge assumptions and agree which opportunity deserves attention.

AI Workflow Sprint helps the people who share a workflow map how it operates today, redesign it around AI, prototype a proposed way of working and test it with users.

Both methods give FDEs a way to bring together different perspectives, make use of the group's collective knowledge and move toward decisions that engineering can act on.

They also give FDE leaders a repeatable approach that can be taught across the team.

This doesn't mean every customer engagement should follow an identical script. Engineers still need judgment to decide which approach fits the situation. But they no longer have to improvise the entire process or rely exclusively on consulting instincts developed through years of experience.

Facilitation becomes a capability you can develop across your FDE team, rather than something you hope every new hire already possesses.