What Kind of FDE Are You?: A Conversation with Vlad Shulman (Part 1)
Former Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Baseten
Vlad Shulman led Forward Deployed Engineering at Baseten, an AI inference platform for mission-critical workloads. Before that, he founded two companies: Retain.ai (acquired by Dagster Labs) and Stork Network. He's now advising startups on building FDE functions. In Part 1 of our conversation, we talked about what FDE actually means today, why the label matters more than people think, and why his most-cited number from his blog post is really a self-accountability tool.
Palantir coined the FDE title over a decade ago. Today you see it on job posts from AI startups, infrastructure companies, traditional SaaS. When you say FDE now, what does it actually mean to you?
I think the broadest umbrella is that it’s a technical or quasi-technical role that accelerates customers to value. You can imagine other roles that have always existed potentially falling into this category. Solutions architecture, professional services, to some degree.
What made Palantir’s version distinct was two things. One, they were literally embedded with the customer. They would go on site, be in the Slack channel, really learn the ins and outs of the organisation. And two, they were actually building things. Processes, products, connecting tools rather than just configuring them.
But today, FDE spans a huge spectrum. A lot of AI companies looking for product-market fit think of FDE as a way to go build something based loosely on what the company has. Just go build something. This is a way of getting more at-bats.
Then you have post-PMF companies that don’t have the most technically complex product but want folks that can help configure it for a customer. In that case, FDE is almost more of a marketing term for recruiting. It doesn’t hurt to have smart people doing this work. But the question is, are they going to be happy doing it in a year?
And then you still have plenty of folks who are going on site, building things, expanding the product perimeter. That’s the Palantir sense.
At Baseten, it was a different flavour again. We had a product, and the buyers were highly technical teams. Staff engineers, L6 equivalents. These are people who traditionally don’t need help building something technical. The reason they were working with us is because they wanted outsized outcomes, two standard deviations better performance on state-of-the-art inference. They’re smart enough that if they invested the resources, they could probably get there. But they’re growing quickly, raising money every six months. What can they stop worrying about? Maybe inference. And inference just happens to be a surprisingly difficult thing to do.
You’re describing at least three or four different roles that all get called FDE. Does that matter?
Honestly, 80% of the conversations I have about FDE, most of the disagreement is because of what the speaker has in mind when they say FDE.
Here’s what happens. You call your role FDE. Externally, people who are applying start self-selecting based on that term. Internally, you start using the term and thinking in that term. You go to your friends and ask what they’re doing for FDE, and they give you their answers. And now it’s affecting what you’re doing. But at this point, it’s already detethered from the actual intent you had. You had some intent and now you’re sailing wherever the wind is blowing.
Is that good or bad? It’s good if you’re directionally aligned. But if your FDE team is doing configurations and you read advice about how much time the team should spend on work that becomes part of the core product, that probably confuses you. It doesn’t jive with how the product works. You just need someone doing last-mile delivery. That might be solutions architecture.
Conversely, people would ask me for advice on navigating large enterprises. I’m not very knowledgeable about that. At Baseten, our people didn’t literally go embedded on site. The traditional enterprise sales challenges that FDE sometimes helps solve, that wasn’t our world. Getting advice on that from me would not be helpful.
I think maybe there’s some sort of one-pager we should put together. How to tell what kind of FDE role this is. Because the signals get mixed up for candidates, for employers, for everyone.
In your article, you wrote that 70% of what FDE builds should go back into the product. For the early-stage startups you’re advising now, is that realistic?
For some reason, that line is the one that many people have messaged me about. Whenever that happens, I wonder if I said something wrong. I’ve thought about it a lot since.
There are two things that are important to understand. When I defined FDE earlier, I did not define it in terms of contributing to the product. I don’t think it’s inherent to the definition that FDEs contribute to the product, even in the Palantir sense. FDE can be using and implementing the product without providing feedback back. But to me, this is where the alpha starts to come out. This is the whole point of FDE in some sense.
The problem is there’s nothing about the incentives of the role that obviously incentivise that. The incentives are typically commercially aligned. So that 70% is more than anything a heuristic to be self-accountable. As a leader, as an individual contributor, you ask yourself: what type of FDE work are you doing?
One place it becomes existentially important is the pre-product-market-fit startup. For a lot of those companies, FDE is this load-bearing function that can be a way to uncover product-market fit. It lets you parallelise discovery. But really, what you’re parallelising is consulting. You think you’re parallelising discovery.
If you’re this kind of company and FDE is load-bearing to do product discovery, I think you only survive if you’re very serious about feeding work back into the product. Ideally, you have a founder involved in a lot of these calls. Because it’s very hard for an FDE to change the direction of your company based on the discovery they made. They can be good advocates for individual features, but for them to say “hey let’s pivot the company based on this feedback customers are giving me...” that’s asking for a lot.
If you’re not thinking of incorporating that feedback back into the product, then you are just consulting. Eventually you’re going to either become a consulting company and maybe make a lot of money, or you’re going to run out of money. But you’re not going to become a product company.
Maybe the number is 60%, maybe it’s 80%. I don’t think it’s 30%. It has to be more than 50 and less than 100. And it has to be less than 100 because if everything your FDE team does becomes product, you’re probably either not taking big enough bets or spending too much time generalizing things before you know if they matter.
Can you give an example of what that looks like in practice? What counts toward that 70%?
At Baseten, one of the biggest things we shipped out of FDE was the ASR product. The transcription, speech-to-text pipeline as a first-class product. It’s a drop-down on the website. That shipped out of FDE and I’m very proud of it.
But these types of products are not 70%. They’re maybe 20-25%. The other 50% are products that shipped out of our product engineer team that FDE materially informed. And tools that the FDE team built for themselves that make each incremental engagement more effective. Things that create leverage.
Shipping a “GA” product is the pinnacle of that motion. But there are reasons why FDE shouldn’t be building all your products, especially as the company grows, because other people develop that speciality.
You can also do zero of that. I don’t think it’s illegal to call that role FDE. But then you’re not getting that feature of FDE. It’s just an implementation team with engineering skills. And it’s very hard to scale that sub-linearly with revenue.
Vlad Shulman is the former Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Baseten. In Part 2, we talk about his path from founding two companies to leading an FDE team, the daily tension between engineering and sales, and why he nearly turned the role down.