Field And Delivery Skills
Customer-facing practices, scoping, implementation, rollout, support, and adoption terms that recur in Forward Deployed Engineer listings.
Forward Deployed Engineer
A software engineer who works close to customers, often inside ambiguous operational environments, to design, build, deploy, and troubleshoot solutions. The role usually blends engineering, solution architecture, product feedback, consulting, and implementation.
Customer Discovery
The practice of learning the customer's real workflow, constraints, goals, stakeholders, existing tools, data sources, and pain points before deciding what to build.
Requirements Gathering
Turning customer needs into clear functional, technical, operational, and success requirements. Good requirements capture what must happen, what must not happen, who owns decisions, and how success will be measured.
Technical Discovery
Customer-facing investigation that identifies the customer's workflow, systems, data sources, constraints, stakeholders, and success criteria before proposing or building a solution.
Solution Engineering
Customer-facing technical work that maps a product or platform to a customer's problem. It often includes demos, architecture design, integrations, prototypes, implementation guidance, and technical troubleshooting.
Professional Services
Paid implementation, customization, integration, advisory, or delivery work provided to customers. In FDE-adjacent roles, professional services often means building usable solutions around a product, not only configuring it.
Proof Of Concept / POC
A small, time-bounded implementation that tests whether a solution can deliver value in the customer's environment. A useful POC has a clear scope, success criteria, data assumptions, and decision point.
Proof Of Value / POV
A customer engagement focused on proving measurable business or workflow value, not just technical feasibility. A POV should connect the prototype or integration to a decision, rollout path, or buying criterion.
Customer Migration
The work of moving a customer from an existing tool, data model, workflow, or manual process into a new platform. Migrations usually need data mapping, validation, rollback thinking, user communication, and post-cutover support.
Production Support
The work of keeping live systems usable after launch: troubleshooting incidents, monitoring behavior, fixing integrations, answering customer issues, coordinating releases, and feeding problems back into product or engineering.
AI Enablement
Helping a team or customer adopt AI in useful, safe, and repeatable ways. This can include workflow discovery, training, implementation support, governance, prompt or eval guidance, and change management.
Product Sense
The ability to make practical product decisions from user needs, constraints, tradeoffs, and business goals. For FDEs, product sense often shows up as knowing what to prototype, what to simplify, and what customer feedback should shape the roadmap.
Go-Live
The point where an implementation becomes active for real users, real customers, or production data.
Implementation Accelerator
A reusable template, script, workflow, checklist, integration module, or playbook that makes future customer deployments faster.
Customer-Facing Technical Asset
A practical artifact built for a customer or sales/delivery motion: demo app, integration guide, migration script, workflow diagram, API example, checklist, or implementation playbook.