
Em Pongpat
1K posts

Em Pongpat
@empongpat
Software Engineer & Entrepreneur & Investor


I remind myself of this quite often.

Forward Deployed Engineer is the hottest, and one of the most in-demand, jobs right now. Every major AI company is hiring including companies like @OpenAI @cognition @AnthropicAI and @Google If you possess a combination of soft skills (good communication), have an engineering background, and are up to speed on the latest and greatest in agentic coding you're probably able to land one of them. They pay well and offer a foot in the door to some of the fastest growing companies in the world.

Forward deployed engineers, or equivalent, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts. Deploying agents is far more technical of a task than most people realize, often far more involved than deploying software. Software generally works the same way every time, and generally for the past few decades has been updated versions of an existing technology or concept (which basically means easier for the enterprise to update their workflows on a newer system). With agents, you’re actually deploying the equivalent of work output within the enterprise. The customer is effectively using you as a professional services provider for a task, which they expect to get solved nearly end-to-end now. This means you need to actually deeply understand the business process as a vendor, and get the customer from the current to the end state seamlessly. Companies need help figuring out which models will work best for their workflows, they need extensive evals setup often, they need change management support for workflows, they need to get their data setup for the agents, and constant tuning of the agentic system for their process. Massive role in tech now. And another example of the kind of highly technical work that AI is creating.

Ilya Sutskever explaining why OpenAI has a for-profit, under oath in a federal court: "if there's no funding, there's no big computer." in the running for quote of the year














