The forward deployed engineer hype, but what is the job actually?

Consultancies across the Netherlands are hunting for forward deployed engineers right now. Phil has been doing the job for eight months, at a company that builds the AI itself. A short personal piece on how he experiences it and what occupies him day to day.

What I do as a forward deployed engineer

What I spend my time on is getting our product into a customer’s organisation. I set it up and configure it until it fits that one organisation. What makes the role different is that you are there at the moment it goes live. That gives it two sides. Technical, because you are continuously improving things, both the process and the product itself. And social, because you sit in on the customer meetings early.

Until recently, almost nobody in the Netherlands held this job title. Now Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini and McKinsey are all recruiting for it, the Dutch financial daily FD reported this month: their clients are done experimenting and want AI inside their processes. What those pieces leave out is what the work looks like from the inside. And especially at a company like this one, where the AI that ends up at the customer is built here, and where improving it is not something you advise on.

I could have become a regular software engineer. What held me back was having to stare at my own screen all day. Friends of mine do that. They spend a year on one small part of a product and at the end of that year they have that part. In eight months I have taken things live at a lot of different companies (ATAG, Gemeente Den Haag and Goede Doelen Loterij among them), and that is a different kind of experience. The difference is not only in how many I have shipped: I now see for myself where things go wrong at a customer, and I get to fix it myself.

What my days look like

Every day except Friday has roughly the same shape: there is a configuration that needs to be finished. Building it takes me the least time. Most of it goes into the question of which of the ten open items comes first. I decide that myself, as long as it is done by the end of the week.

On Fridays I set my own agenda

Every Friday there is a Freeday moment: a day where you get to work on your own personal project. No sprint work, no configuration that has to be finished, but a personal goal you can spend the whole afternoon on. The thinking behind it is that you develop yourself on something the company also benefits from, and that you are the best judge of where that is.

I use my Friday to make my own work better: problems I have run into at customers, I look them up and build a solution for them. The kind of thing you have little time for during the week, but that helps you every day.

Last month that produced the following. At the start of an implementation we get the customer’s knowledge base, because that is where the answers have to come from. Often it is not in order yet. Articles are missing, or they are written in a way that means they are not found for the question they belong to. Until now we only discovered that during testing, when things were already busy. So I built a skill that runs the test scenarios against the knowledge base in advance and shows what falls through. I want to use it on the next implementation.

That is also where my choice for Freeday came from. I had been offered a contract elsewhere, and what decided it was the answer to my question about where I could grow to: “squad lead of the implementation team”. That path was already fixed, and I could not see myself walking it.

Here people look at which direction you want to go, and that one day a week is the concrete form of it. What I do in that time is mine, and it simply goes into the next implementation.

“Here people look at which direction you want to go, every Friday there is time reserved for personal development.”

What I do not decide

That freedom has edges, and it is more honest to put them here straight away.

The customer relationship is not mine. I work one-on-one with the implementation lead, who set the project up, knows the stakeholders and stays the point of contact. In the meetings I am there and I contribute, and my assignment is to show that the product lands.

The pace is not mine either. Performing under pressure is the hardest thing I have run into so far. I am still a junior, but I am not doing it all on my own. Around me sit experienced developers who guide me. That works well here, because I have never been in a room with so many sharp people at once. It is intense, and at the same time it pulls more out of you than you would get out of yourself alone, because you can spar with anyone about whatever you are working out.

“I have never been in a room with so many bright people at once.”

What I would tell someone

The job title forward deployed engineer is now in the vacancies of half of Dutch consulting. What I would look at is the difference between the roles, because it varies a lot. Is the job mainly implementation, or are you also working on the product and can you build on it yourself? Being able to decide how my own week is structured also gives me a boost in confidence and affects my motivation. Finally: I have only just entered working life, but one thing stands out. The room to develop yourself is much bigger here than for friends of mine at large corporates. Working at Freeday shows me several sides of how business works, which means I gain a lot of experience and get to build a network.

Working at Freeday

Freeday is hiring forward deployed engineers in Rotterdam, hybrid. See the vacancy and apply.