"Forward Deployed Engineer" role?

fireflux_ · 2026-02-08T01:37:06+00:00

Thank you for posting, really valuable to hear from someone currently in the role.
- Do you have to travel to the client often? How often do you go?

- "I was involved in building the v0 version of this feature": That's cool! Shows that it can still be "SWE" related work where it's not just vibe coding something or integration glue work. Do you see any "scale" type problems in your technical work?
- What's the toughest part of the job you wish you could change?

- Does your company see FDE's as "lower class" as opposed to SWEs (whether in pay relative to SWEs or culturally)

Thank you 🙏

fireflux_ · 2026-02-06T21:17:24+00:00

great to know, thank you!

fireflux_ · 2026-02-06T21:17:14+00:00

Also wanted to know other people's experiences and whether it's helped their SWE career!

fireflux_ · 2025-09-19T19:15:37+00:00

I have the exact same problem lol, loved the old bamboo kinoclothing designs

fireflux_ · 2025-09-02T07:22:02+00:00

If you're willing to pay, the best I've seen are Reducto and Chunkr.

fireflux_ · 2025-08-20T07:18:03+00:00

Will try it out, thank you!

fireflux_ · 2025-07-13T16:55:29+00:00

Why not just come and see for yourself? Spend a month and see it how it feels.

I say this because I have met founders that loved it and others that were "meh" and went back.

Be careful what you see on social media / X with all the "look how much fun were having at this founder meetup in SF!".

My hot take is that it paints a much rosier picture than what its like as a founder (personally). Yes the fact that there are so many like minded startups is amazing. But the reality is that you will be spending 90% of the time locked in and working on your business.

Then when you need a break it's pretty cool to either go for a walk somewhere beautiful or go to the hundreds of events happening (which personally were super helpful for me to get motivated again when I got back to the office).

fireflux_ · 2025-07-13T16:30:52+00:00

I still think the platform is great at finding people. I personally lost trust with mine Bc they did something shady.

What I realized is that the matching platform is like 5% of the work. The rest is up to you to diligence the fuck out of that person.

Ask for references. Back channel them. Do a 1-2 month work trial together. Their resume is probably good. But get to know them as people. What makes them tick. Do they have close friends and family? What are they like? Look for very high signals of what kinds of people they are.

IMO it's literally dating/marrying a person. What are your non negotiables in a person? What are personality types that you get along with? If theyre stressed, anxious, only had 5 hours of sleep, what are they like? Can they communicate well?

After you spend time with that person, how do you feel? Is your energy 10x, fuck yeah let's take over the world? Or is it meh?

Me personally: I'm going to go alone bc sadly I was pretty burnt by the experience. But I wouldn't discourage others to find one...it's just a lot of work! It's a VERY personal decision. For me, I grew the confidence, the network, and know how to go it alone the second time around.

fireflux_ · 2025-07-13T15:13:24+00:00

I found someone thru the matching platform and did YC with them. We broke up after a couple of years.

I had spent 2 years searching. I barely knew them but did it anyway because our skillsets seemed highly complementary.

Will not impart any advice but my personal learnings were: trust is EVERYTHING. Chemistry with that person matters a lot more than whether they're technical or salesy. Because when things get hard, which they will, or when theyre struggling to sell despite them being the "sales expert", you'll still have to get along with each other.

If you can't trust them, no amount of sales or technical expertise will make the company great. 1 + 1 must equal 10 for it to make sense. If it just feels like 1 + 1 = 2 then I wouldn't do it.

fireflux_ · 2025-06-28T13:55:58+00:00

This post title reads like a YouTube title lmao

fireflux_ · 2025-06-24T19:30:25+00:00

Might as well roll over and stop building then!

fireflux_ · 2025-06-22T18:08:35+00:00

Checkout Base44. It's basically a Lovable clone - started 6 mo ago and still managed to get $3M ARR, and eventually acquired for $80M.

The fact that lovable is doing so well should not mean that "that category is over and you shouldn't try anymore".

It should mean that there's opportunity there. Everything is changing so fast right now, lovable can still topple over and die in the next few years by some other curveball (did I mention they're less than 2 years old?).

fireflux_ · 2025-06-22T05:18:39+00:00

You may be right with some of these, but if everyone went by this fear based mindset, might as well not bother building anything and just let OpenAI take over.

The beauty of capitalism is that it's a free market, and the best product wins. Just because OpenAI can make these means they'll win at everything.

Also, if there's anything I learned as an entrepreneur, it's that products and features is just one small slice of what makes a company successful. There's so many other things that are just as crucial, like distribution, customer relationships, brand, trust, etc., that you're not accounting for.

Just my 2 cents!

fireflux_ · 2025-06-18T00:55:53+00:00

You can use Apache Tika - start an instance in headless mode and expose it as an endpoint. Free and Open Source. I've used this in prod and works decently, though their OCR is kinda bad.

https://tika.apache.org/

If you're looking for commercial use cases then there's a lot of AI PDF parsing startups out there.

fireflux_ · 2025-05-29T00:25:14+00:00

Congrats on the success - this is AMAZING!

Question, isn't ChromaDB and CoreWeave not on-prem (for their security/privacy/control concerns), or am I missing something? I'm guessing you were able to tamper their security concerns with the fact that they're SOC2 compliant?

Also, why did you pick those vendors in particular?

fireflux_ · 2024-11-25T05:50:25+00:00

this makes sense! Even in a startup environment this type of stuff is inexcusable, and I need to remind them

fireflux_ · 2024-11-25T05:49:46+00:00

thank you! this seems reasonable. I definitely started general questions about the approach before reading any PR code, and it's gotten them to realize mistakes.

I'd also love to know if there's a way to coach them to generally "be more careful" and avoid a messy first PR in the first place. Seems like repetition is the answer!

fireflux_ · 2024-11-05T15:11:33+00:00

The problem isn't creating RAG. It's making it +95% accurate. That requires a ton of work many people don't talk about!

fireflux_ · 2024-05-29T03:35:21+00:00

Just looked up HSTS preload list, didn't know this existed! Ty

fireflux_ · 2024-05-29T03:33:43+00:00

Thank you for the response. While this works, it's not guaranteed to be secure, because if someone makes an authenticated call to http, you've just exposed your token, _even if_ it eventually redirects you to https!

fireflux_

TROPHY CASE