Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Workshop: From AI Demo to Production
Learn the FDE skill stack, scope a 90-day regulated AI-agent deployment, and build a practical career plan with expert instructors.
Forward Deployed Engineers are the people who close that gap. They work at the intersection of software engineering, AI systems, customer discovery, security, governance, and measurable business outcomes.
In this live, highly interactive workshop, you will examine how the FDE role works, what employers expect, and what it takes to move an AI system from an impressive demonstration into a secure, reliable, adopted production workflow.
The Forward Deployed Engineering model was popularized by Palantir and is now appearing across frontier AI companies, cloud platforms, AI-native startups, and professional-services organizations. Although responsibilities differ between employers, the common thread is end-to-end ownership: understanding an ambiguous customer problem, designing the solution, building and integrating it, establishing evaluation and governance, and helping users adopt it.
This is not a passive webinar. You will assess your current skills, examine the anatomy of a production deployment, work in a team to scope a 90-day AI-agent implementation for a regulated customer, defend your plan in a CISO hot-seat, and leave with a concrete career-development plan.
What you will learn
By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:
Explain what a Forward Deployed Engineer does and how the role differs from solutions architecture, sales engineering, implementation engineering, consulting, and product engineering.
Map the technical, commercial, and interpersonal skills required for different FDE roles.
Identify what model labs, hyperscalers, startups, and consultancies look for when hiring FDEs.
Turn an ambiguous customer problem into a clearly scoped production-AI deployment.
Define success metrics, evaluation methods, security controls, human-approval points, and rollout gates for an agentic system.
Respond to questions from security, legal, operations, product, and executive stakeholders.
Build a personal 90-day plan for developing an FDE portfolio and targeting suitable roles.
What you will work on
During the workshop, you will create:
An FDE skill-stack self-assessment
A personal strengths-and-gaps heatmap
An employer-fit and target-company map
A 90-day regulated AI-agent deployment plan
A security and governance checklist
An evaluation and reliability scorecard
A deployment risk register
A 90-day FDE career action plan
Prerequisites
Participants should have basic familiarity with software systems, cloud platforms, data, APIs, or AI applications.
This is a technical and strategic workshop, but it is not a live coding bootcamp. No development environment or specialist software is required.
Please join from a laptop or desktop computer so that you can participate fully in the team simulation and collaborative exercises.
Instructors
Keith Bourne is a Forward Deployed AI Engineer at Tribe AI and the founder of Memriq AI. He has more than a decade of experience shipping production AI systems across startups and large enterprises and is the author of Unlocking Data with Generative AI and RAG. His work spans generative AI, RAG, agent architecture, evaluation, enterprise deployment, and the translation of business requirements into scalable technical systems.
Tanya Dixit is a Forward Deployed Engineer at Google, partnering with enterprise customers across APAC to move production AI systems from concept to deployment. Her experience includes agentic AI, voice AI, multimodal architectures, evaluation, LLMOps, and enterprise use cases in banking, financial services, and healthcare.