The Forward Deployed Engineer: A Conversation on the Hottest Title in AI Startups
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is having a major moment — FDE postings surged 800%+ in 2025 with AI startups across NYC & SF + big names like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Palantir all prioritizing these titles. We'll cover the role itself, why AI startups are driving demand, and what leaders actively hiring for the role consider a strong FDE.
Join Acacia - a technical recruiting firm for early stage high growth startups - two exceptional AI startup leaders (Caitlin & Jordan) & Kamesh (Sr. FDE @ Ripplins) in an intimate panel discussion + happy hour.
[agenda]
6:30pm ET - 7pm ET Panel Discussion
7pm ET - 8pm ET Happy Hour
[panelists]
Caitlin Leksana, Co-Founder & CEO of Fazeshift (YC & Google backed) — an AI startup automating accounts receivable so finance teams can move faster and make confident, data-driven decisions. Founded with her Harvard MBA classmate Timmy Galvin, their enterprise-grade AI agents process thousands of transactions daily across industries — handling cash application, payment comms, and customer experience at scale. Customers are skyrocketing (think $1B+ revenue), and therefore hiring multiple Forward Deployed Engineers across NYC & SF.
Jordan DeLoach, VP of Engineering at Scaled Cognition — the world's only model lab built exclusively for customer experience, pioneering agentic AI that enterprises can actually trust. Founded by ex-Microsoft VP of Conversational AI, Dan Roth, and UC Berkeley AI Professor, Dan Klein, + backed by Khosla Ventures ($21M Seed; Vinod Khosla on the board), Scaled Cognition's flagship Agentic Pretrained Transformer (APT) eliminates hallucinations and enforces enterprise policy in real-world CX workflows — where reliability isn't optional.
They're hiring many FDEs across the US to work directly with customers, ship AI agents that solve real problems, and push the boundaries of what agentic AI can do in the field
Kamesh Vedula is a Sr.FDE at Rippling — the workforce platform processing payroll and HR for tens of thousands of companies globally — where he joined as a founding member of the FDE org. At Rippling, he embeds directly inside enterprise clients across industries, designing and shipping custom integrations, workflows, and applications that solve problems no off-the-shelf product can.
He represents a new archetype of FDE: part engineer, part solutions architect, part product partner — and has a front-row seat to how AI is fundamentally reshaping what's possible in the field. Rippling's FDE team is rapidly growing and actively hiring engineers across the US — with offices in New York, Austin, and San Francisco, and Seattle coming soon.