Forward Deployed Engineer

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a hands-on builder on the Customer Experience (CX) team who embeds engineering, data, and application development directly into customer environments to deliver measurable mission outcomes. The FDE embeds with customers during time-boxed engagements, learns how their decisions are actually made, and rapidly turns ambiguous needs into production-grade applications on the Decision Lens platform.

Operating at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer experience, the FDE owns problems end-to-end—from discovery and solution design through build, demo, stabilization, and handoff—using modern AI-assisted development tools to accelerate time-to-value without sacrificing engineering discipline. Beyond any single engagement, the FDE institutionalizes reusable patterns and feeds field insights back into the product roadmap, helping Decision Lens scale rather than become a bespoke services organization.

Embed onsite with customers through discovery, trust-building, workflow mapping, solution design, deployment and stabilization.

Work cross functionally including with CX, engineering, sales, solutions engineering and functional SMEs to understand the customer’s challenges and design the best solution.

Translate ambiguity into a clear solution to be deployed within Decision Lens.

Proactively identify when the stated requirement is not the real problem, and ask the few critical questions early that prevent weeks of rework later.

Design and build working applications on the Decision Lens platform in Data Hub/App Hub.

Work across the full application stack: frontend, backend, APIs, data layer, workflow logic, and deployment configuration.

Design data models that support decision workflows, prioritization, scoring, traceability, auditability, and executive reporting.

Make pragmatic tradeoffs—speed versus scope versus scalability—and deliver quickly, then iterate from customer feedback toward operational readiness.

Take personal responsibility for the reliability, security, testing, and quality of everything deployed.

Use AI coding agents and AI-assisted tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Git Hub Copilot to accelerate development, testing, debugging, and documentation.

Prompt, direct, and review AI-generated code while maintaining ownership of architecture, technical decisions, and quality—reviewing, testing, and hardening AI-assisted work before customer delivery.

Exercise strong judgment about where AI-generated code is useful and where it creates risk, and never expose sensitive customer data or controlled information in unauthorized tooling.

Run demo-driven development cycles with frequent customer feedback; show working software early and respond constructively when users challenge the application, data, or logic.

Stay engaged through stabilization until the application is usable, accepted, and has an identified operational owner—then exit cleanly so the solution never becomes permanently dependent on the individual FDE.

Produce crisp written plans, decision logs, implementation notes, and executive-ready updates, and communicate tradeoffs in business, operational, and mission terms.

Say “no,” “not yet,” or “phase two” gracefully when scope threatens the timeline, architecture, or mission outcome.

Identify reusable apps, templates, integration patterns, workflow components, and data models from field engagements, and contribute them back to Decision Lens repositories and playbooks.

Serve as the voice of the field to Product and Engineering, distinguishing one-off customer‑specific work from repeatable product…