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Become a Forward Deployed Engineer
Roadmap

From solutions, sales engineering or consulting

Solutions engineers, sales engineers, pre-sales and technical consultants who run demos and discovery and want to build and own what gets deployed.

What already counts

  • Discovery calls and mapping stakeholders
  • Demos, proposals and executive communication
  • Handling objections and managing expectations
  • Knowing how enterprise buying, security reviews and procurement work

What to add

  • Coding depth: interview coding rounds and production code
  • Integration engineering: pipelines, retries and idempotency
  • Evals and proving quality, beyond a good demo
  • Owning the system after the sale: debugging, rollout and handover

  1. 1Code like an engineerWeeks 1 to 6

    Build real coding fluency in Python and SQL, and learn to read and fix code you did not write.

    Learn

    Python for field workMessy data: CSV, JSON, Excel exports and datesHTTP and APIs from the client's sideGit and code review in someone else's repoReading an unfamiliar codebase fastFixing code someone else wroteYour first query: SELECTJoining tables

    Practise

    Code Lab: Weekly sales by salespersonCode Lab: Page through the CRM without losing anyoneCode Lab: Fix the appointment reminder scriptSQL Lab: Users nobody has paidSQL Lab: November's takingsCode Lab: Fix a headcount tally that double countsCode Lab: Fix Raftaar's daily delivery report

    Show for it: Every Code Lab foundations exercise passed, and a repo with a script that pulls data from a public API into SQLite with tests.

  2. 2Integration and dataWeeks 7 to 10

    Learn the plumbing that demos skip: webhooks, nightly syncs, retries, logs and containers.

    Learn

    Integration patterns: APIs, webhooks, files and queuesData pipelines in and out of customer systemsGlue code that doesn't break: retries, timeouts and idempotencyLogs, metrics and debugging in productionContainers and deploying a service

    Practise

    Code Lab: Verify Setu's webhooks and ignore repeatsCode Lab: Nightly discharge sync from the hospital systemCode Lab: Fix the sync that doubles and drops shipmentsTake-home: Sync two HR systems and reconcile themCode Lab: Charge orders through a flaky payments APICode Lab: Reconcile orders with billing

    Show for it: The HR sync take-home running in a container, rerun twice without doubling a single row.

  3. 3AI you can proveWeeks 11 to 14

    Move from showing AI to measuring it: retrieval, evals, guardrails, cost and staged rollout.

    Learn

    Is this a good AI use case?Answers over a customer's private dataEvals: golden sets, graders and regression suitesGuardrails and human reviewCost and latency budgetsShadow mode, pilots and go-live

    Practise

    Take-home: Product search that understands how people typePrompt Lab: Design an evalCode Lab: Shadow-mode report for Suraksha's claims

    Show for it: The product search take-home with an eval report that shows where it fails, not only where it shines.

  4. 4Promise less, ship moreWeeks 15 to 16

    Change habits from the sales side: scope small, say no to impossible asks and protect the delivery date.

    Learn

    FDE vs software engineer, solutions engineer and consultantScoping the first projectSaying no and pushing backManaging scope and expectations

    Practise

    Customer Room: Reading claim documents, and the demand for 100 percentCustomer Room: An agent that updates the sales CRMField Lab: One-page scope for Raftaar's gate delaysField Lab: Refuse Dukaan's auto-discount request with an alternativeField Lab: Change request for three new document types at Suraksha

    Show for it: Two Customer Room sessions where you turned down a demand for 100 percent accuracy or a risky autonomous agent and still left with an agreed first project.

  5. 5Interview as an engineerWeeks 17 to 18

    Prepare for the rounds where your coding is tested hardest, and tell your customer stories as an engineer.

    Learn

    Switching into FDE from another roleHow the FDE interview worksThe re-engineering and coding roundsThe take-home and its walkthroughBehavioural rounds and the project deep dive

    Practise

    Code Lab: Fix the sync that doubles and drops shipmentsField Lab: Map a job posting to your skills and a six-week planField Lab: Rewrite five weak CV bullets for an FDE application

    Show for it: Two timed re-engineering practice sessions completed, and a CV where technical work you did yourself is clearly separated from work you sold.