Forward Deployed Engineering Industry Mentor

Overview

• Duration: 10–15 hours/week for 12 weeks
• Next Cohort: Starts June 15, 2026

The Residency is a 12-week program where engineers and pre-founders deploy AI for real customers under senior mentorship. As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you lead teams of residents through customer engagements, from scoping to production. You run the early client calls, step back as each team takes ownership, and make sure what they ship still works after you leave.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership

• Lead teams of residents through 12-week deployments, each with its own customer
• Run the first customer calls. Scope the engagement and get acceptance criteria signed before implementation begins
• Step back as residents take ownership of scoping, stakeholders, integration, and rollout
• Make architecture, scope, speed, and quality trade-offs with the team, and teach them to make those calls on their own

Mentorship & Review

• Host weekly group office hours across all teams in the cohort. Each team brings their hardest open problem
• Hold 1:1s with residents or teams when needed
• Write a candid reference letter for every resident you lead, regardless of how the deployment went

Program Contribution

• Capture patterns across the cohort's teams in our internal knowledge system so future cohorts can use them
• Work with vendor PMs and engineering when scope negotiation or product gaps come up
• Refine scoping rubrics, acceptance criteria templates, and cohort playbooks with the program team

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering, with multiple Forward Deployed engagements from scoping to production. Senior FDE experience at Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, or a comparable environment
• Demonstrated judgment under ambiguity: scoping decisions, stakeholder navigation, architecture trade-offs, and knowing when to rewrite versus ship
• Production experience with agents in the loop. Built eval suites, harnesses, and feedback systems that surface regressions before they reach customers
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including executives, and the ability to disagree without damaging the working relationship
• Learner empathy: you notice where a resident is stuck before you answer. Prior teaching, coaching, or institutional mentorship experience preferred

Ideal Candidate Traits

• Teaches by asking questions alongside real problems
• Candid in reviews and day-to-day feedback
• Measures success by whether the system is still running months after handoff

Why Join

• Change how AI-era engineers are trained. The industry's last-mile problem is a training problem, and no serious playbook exists yet. You help build it
• No individual contributor load, on-call rotation, or expansion targets. You're here to think, teach, and guide the hard decisions
• The role is built around mentorship and review. Invest in people without stepping away from real production work
• Part-time, fully remote, no travel required. Compatible with an existing job, consulting practice, or founder runway
• Direct visibility into multiple customer deployments each cohort. See patterns repeat across teams and industries, the kind of breadth that takes years inside a single company
• A peer group of senior FDEs working through the same problems, plus a growing network of residents and vendor contacts across cohorts