FDE: who is responsible for making AI work for the customer? (#Management)

On October 14, the Code of Leadership livestream will explore Forward Deployed Engineering: engineers who immerse themselves in a customer’s problems and bring a solution to a working outcome. Our guest is Pavel Golubev, Principal AI FDE Manager at Microsoft and author of the Corporate AI Telegram channel (https://t.me/corporateAI). His experience includes industrial consulting, supply-chain optimization, Data Science at Beat and EPAM, and Azure customer projects in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Pavel has worked both as a manager and on the Principal IC engineering track, so we will discuss both implementing AI personally and leading people who do it.

In our previous episode with Pavel, we reached the FDE topic and agreed to return to it. Now I want to understand what has changed in the work and the engineer’s responsibilities since then.

An FDE has an interesting task: being responsible for the result when the data, processes, access, and many decisions belong to other people. The customer is not one person either: a manager, a user, and security may have very different ideas of successful implementation. Writing code is only part of the work.

We will discuss: — How does an FDE differ from a consultant, a solution architect, or a product-team engineer? — What does the journey from “we want to adopt AI” to a system people actually use look like? — How do you agree on success criteria and hold project boundaries as requests keep growing? — What does AI change in implementation costs, and where do people and processes still take a long time to understand? — How does an FDE Manager assign engineers to projects, verify quality, and help in difficult situations? — Who is this role suitable for, which skills are needed to enter it, and when does a company not need an FDE at all?

We will try to walk through one implementation, from the initial request to launch and ongoing support. We will discuss decisions, tradeoffs, and who owns the system after the team leaves.

Join us if you implement AI, lead an engineering team, or are considering FDE as your next career step. Bring questions—we will leave time for them during the livestream!

P.S. This episode continues the subject of the FDE book I wrote about yesterday.

#AI4SDLC #Agents #Evals #Engineering #SystemDesign #Software