Small Teams, Big Enterprise: Inside Forward-Deployed Engineering

​Organizations committed close to $10B to forward-deployed engineering in the past year, and the number of FDEs grew about 40x in two years. Deploying technology at AI speed inside a large enterprise means working through organizational complexity, finding the opportunities worth the effort, and connecting what the technology can do to business outcomes.

In this session, Aaron Chau, Senior Product Manager shares his experience standing up forward-deployed engineering teams at Symbotic, a US robotics and automation company working across large-scale robotic systems, edge computing, and enterprise operations.

​He will explore why FDE exists, how it complements traditional engineering teams and enterprise operating structures, and the unique blend of engineering, product, and business skills required to succeed. He will also share how he worked with Symbotic's Vietnam engineering office and discuss the principles and collaborative practices that enable small FDE teams to deliver outsized impact and become a multiplicative force for enterprise acceleration.

​What you'll get

​For engineers:

• ​What FDE work looks like day to day inside a large enterprise

• ​How the role differs from other engineering roles.

• ​The product and business skills FDEs rely on, which most engineers were never taught

​For business owners:

• ​How a small FDE team works alongside your existing engineering and operations teams

• ​How to choose the first problems to give an FDE team

• ​A working example of an FDE team in serving enterprise operations

​About sixonefour labs

​sixonefour labs trains engineers for roles like FDE, where writing code is only part of the job. Engineers learn to work with users and business owners, decide what is worth building, direct AI tools to build it, and own the outcome after it ships.