Glossary
Forward Deployed Engineering glossary
Definitions for the terms buyers and providers use around forward deployed engineering and AI implementation.
- Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
- A software engineer embedded with a customer to build, integrate and ship software or AI in the customer's own environment.
- Forward Deployed Engineering
- A delivery model in which engineers embed with a customer to build and ship production systems, rather than working only behind a product roadmap.
- FDE pod
- A small cross-functional team of forward deployed engineers, typically two to five people, engaged together for a customer deployment.
- Embedded engineering
- An engagement model where external engineers join a customer's team, tools and rituals instead of delivering from a separate vendor team.
- Solutions engineer
- A technical pre-sales role that supports a sale with demos, proofs of concept and technical guidance.
- Staff augmentation
- Adding external engineers to an existing team under the customer's direction, without the provider owning the outcome.
- AI implementation
- The work of taking an AI use case from prototype to a production system, including integration, evaluation, deployment and monitoring.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- A technique that gives a language model relevant documents or data at query time so answers are grounded in a customer's own information.