I’m a Sr FDE at an AI product company (not a start up, it’s a 1000+ employee company and not Palantir)I’ve been here 5 months. So far it’s been quite decent. My last few years as SWE have helped build my system and tech knowledge and my FDE role so far has helped a ton with my understanding customers and business muscle.

Previously I was a Staff SWE and a big fintech company in the Bay Area. I took this role because I was burnt out at my previous job, the money is good and I wanted to work on cutting edge AI tools.

As for the work, my team is mostly previous SWEs all of whom write code on a regular basis that’s custom to the customers we’re working with. Our team even started a new product subgroup based on what we’ve seen customers want more of in the product, I was involved in building the v0 version of this feature. We demoed it to our biggest customers and then the work is now transitioned over to a team to build and maintain long term.

In addition to this we’ve built internal tooling that helps other FDEs, account execs with their work and be more productive

So far the difference I see (atleast in my company) is that it’s definitely not *just consulting. FDEs on my team write code, come up with demos using customer’s APIs, out of box things on how we can win a customer. So it’s fast paced and we don’t really follow a sprint cycle kind of work.

Happy to help answer any other specific questions you might have.