Notion

Google

Bloomberg

Scale AI

Accenture

Paden Gayle

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg 

Break Into Forward Deployed Engineering

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE

Real sanitized stories from live enterprise engagements at Notion and Accenture, and how the role differs from SWE.

What FDEs actually do all day

The five things interviewers actually score, and why strong engineers get passed over for these roles.

What FDE hiring loops screen for

Live before/after resume bullet rewrites using a simple formula you can apply to your own resume that night.

Reposition your resume for AI roles

The skills you need to succeed as an AI Forward Deployed Engineer in production environments.

Owner/CEO, AI Makerspace

AI Makerspace

AI Fund

FourthBrain

University of Dayton

Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.

Building industry-leading AI training for engineers and teams since 2021

Author, LLMs in Production

Matthew Sharp

Matt Sharp is a seasoned leader and professor in AI, MLOps and Engineering. 

Information Systems Engineer at Adobe

Tyler Laughlin

A background in BI, data science, machine learning, and cloud-native apps.

Cohort 1

Cohort 2

This is a live class with real experts and a hard limit of 30 people. Please see "Who this course is for" before applying.AI Forward Deployed Engineering today refers to the industry-relevant skills needed to scope customer problems, to build and test AI prototypes with users, to deploy prototypes to existing production environments, and to secure, operate, and improve production applications at scale that generate real ROI.Our <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/the-aie-bootcamp-changelog/">curriculum changelog</a> shows the evolution of our flagship course (previously <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://maven.com/aimakerspace/ai-eng-bootcamp">The AI Engineering Bootcamp</a> - <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/the-ai-engineering-bootcamp-book/">textbook</a> coming soon) from 2024 to today. We enrolled over 538 students in the first 10 cohorts, certifying 272 of them as <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/graduates">Certified AI Engineers</a>.Our v1.1 (Cohort 11) course has expanded the curriculum and has a higher, more specific bar for admission than ever before. It will help you build 🏗️, ship 🚢, and share 🚀 your way through the vast AI product-engineering landscape by focusing on a single problem that matters to your company.AI Makerspace is the only certified enterprise training partner of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/a-meaningful-milestone-today-for-ai-makerspace-ugcPost-7460037108691476481-0wES?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop&amp;rcm=ACoAAAOfOE4BdOGPD97rGOwB0qdCpNDB_wvyxsI">Andrew Ng &amp; Kirsty Tan's AI Aspire</a> on Maven. Learn more about custom offerings <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/agentic/">here</a>.

The industry-standard certification for production AI FDEs.

Scope problems & their solutions better than Anthropic & OpenAI FDEs 

Apply best-practices from MVP to production

Understand why open weights matter and how to use them

Embrace evals as the language that connects business to engineering

Understand why security and adversarial techniques are first-class issues

Understand scaling and what it takes from product and engineering perspectives

VSCode with GitHub Copilot (or equivalent) should be your daily driver already.

Git & Python mastery, Coding Agent (e.g., Claude Code or Codex) proficiency

If you have never held a job where you contribute code to a production software environment, this class is not for you.

Experience writing code that is deployed to production software environments

This means an understanding of training, testing, and inference for various model architectures, including LLMs

Machine Learning & Deep Learning fundamentals

Engineers working full-time inside a company that are prepared to bring a real use case from work and iterate on the AI solution weekly.

If you are a startup founder, consultant, big tech employee, or currently unemployed, this course is likely NOT for you.

If you are unable to get sponsorship from your company to take this course, this course is likely NOT for you.

The #1 FDE Skill Isn't AI or Coding. It's Storytelling!

Top 1% AI Expert, Ex-@Google, Microsoft

Microsoft

The Wharton School

Intel

Priyanka Vergadia

AI & Cloud leader @Microsoft @Google | Visual Storyteller | TED Speaker

I've built and hired FDE teams, DevRel and Solutions Engineers for 10+ Years. This workshop teaches what hiring managers look for beyond coding!As a Software Engineer or AI Engineer, you can build agentic workflows and ship AI apps in days. That's not what makes a good FDE.What kills FDE careers early: a CTO wants faster deployments, you jump to CI/CD tooling. The engineering team is uncomfortable you're there, you don't notice. Someone hands you a pre-scoped project, you build without asking if it's the right problem.FDE roles are everywhere: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic are all building this function. But engineers getting those offers aren't winning on technical chops. They ask questions, keep going past the first answer, figure out who does the work, who feels threatened, what's politically doable. Not just tech. People. Org charts. They leave with scoped projects the customer actually wants built.In this workshop you will:<ul><li>Run real discovery conversations with enterprise customers</li><li>Navigate stakeholders who don't all agree and some who don't want you there</li><li>Turn a business goal into a scoped project you can deliver</li></ul>AI and code got you this far. This gets you to FDE.

Go from engineer to FDE with the SCOPE Method: uncover problems, manage politics, define outcomes, influence without authority.

STUDY & CONNECT: Run executive discovery that uncovers the real business problem

OBSERVE: Double-click past surface-level asks to find the real problem

PEOPLE: Navigate stakeholder politics and influence without authority

EXECUTE: Scope projects tied to outcomes and present with confidence

Software Engineers: You ship production systems but have never run customer discovery or scoped a project from a vague exec ask.

Solutions Architects Consultants: You have stakeholder skills but need the framework to own outcomes and shape projects, not just sell them.

Technical Product Managers: You define what gets built but have never embedded with a customer's engineering team to ship it yourself.

Master the FDE skills companies now expect

AI Entrepreneur | Ex-Google, Microsoft

Aishwarya Srinivasan

AI Engineering Lead | Founder

Arvind Narayanamurthy

September 2026 Cohort

50% off for Early Birds Use code: 50OFF ( Deadline 30th Aug 6pm PT)⭐️ <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://maven.com/aishwarya-srinivasan/mastering-ai-agents">Complimentary with our flagship- Mastering Agentic AI Certification Program</a>Forward Deployed Engineering is becoming one of the most important roles in AI because companies are no longer just asking, “Can we build a demo?” They are asking, “Can this agent work inside our real customer environment?”That requires a very different skill set. FDEs need to understand how LLMs behave, how RAG systems fail, how agents call tools, how enterprise APIs and knowledge bases fit together, and how to deploy systems that can handle latency, cost, scale, security, and reliability constraints.This workshop is designed to bridge that exact gap. You will go from AI fundamentals to building a working agent, connecting it to real tools and enterprise systems, and deploying it on Google Cloud with Vertex AI. The goal is not surface-level AI literacy. The goal is to think, build, debug, and ship like the engineer companies trust to take AI from prototype to production.

You’ll learn to build, debug, deploy, and explain production AI agents like a Forward Deployed Engineer.

Build AI agents that work beyond the demo

Think like a production AI engineer

Deploy agents into real customer environments

Future FDEs For people who want to break into Forward Deployed Engineering or AI implementation roles.

Customer-facing technologists For solutions engineers, TAMs, consultants, and architects moving closer to AI systems.

AI career switchers For engineers and technical professionals transitioning into agentic AI and production AI roles.

Leave knowing exactly how the 2026 AI interview loops run, and how to pass each round.

PhD in ML | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Amazon Web Services

OpenAI

NVIDIA

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Exited AI Founder | Founder, TAI Labs

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

McKinsey & Company

Manu Jayawardana

AI Advisor | Founder, TAI Labs

Cohort 3

August 2026 Cohort

You're prepping with 2023 material for 2026 interviews. Meta and Google now run AI-assisted coding rounds where the interviewer reads your entire AI conversation. FDE hiring is up over 1,000%, and most openings aren't at the labs, they're at startups, enterprise SaaS, and consultancies. Grinding LeetCode alone won't get you through these interviews.In 4 weeks, you'll prepare for the interview loops companies actually run, whether you're targeting AI Engineer, Applied AI or Forward Deployed roles.<ul><li>Practice the AI-assisted coding format used in modern technical interviews, before it counts</li><li>Drill the Python patterns and problem-solving skills that show up in real AI engineering loops</li><li>Design RAG and agent systems the way interviewers evaluate them</li><li>Run the FDE case study, then learn how to negotiate the offer properly </li></ul>Our students come from MAANG companies, and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://tailabs.ai/#:~:text=role%20in%20FAANG.%E2%80%9D-,Forward%20Deployed%20AI%20Engineer,-Chicago%2C%20IL">some have landed roles at MAANG straight after finishing the bootcamp.</a>Want to see how we teach first? Watch our free recorded mini-series, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://theaiinternship.com/courses/think-like-an-ai-engineer/">Think Like an AI Engineer</a>.A limited number of need-based scholarships are available for applicants facing real financial hardship. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://theaiinternship.com/scholarship">See if you qualify.</a>

Early Bird Discount ends in 24 hours; then the price jumps back to $999!

Pass the AI assisted coding rounds Meta and Google now run

Crack LeetCode patterns and Python rounds without endless grinding

Design AI systems the way interviewers score them

Run the FDE case study that filters most candidates

Target the right companies across every tier

Close the offer with leverage

You can write and debug Python. We sharpen it for interviews, we don't teach it from zero

Working Python and basic coding ability

You've used or built with AI tools. Production experience helps but isn't required.

Some exposure to LLM tools or products

The AI Engineer candidate. You build with LLMs and get screens, but loops keep ending at the system design or AI-assisted coding round.

The AI FDE aspirant. You want a forward deployed role and know the case study, not the coding, is what filters you.

The career switcher. You are a software, data or ML engineer moving into AI roles and need to know the actual bar.

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

The Full Stack Career

Product managers who drive strategy, development, and launch of products.

Engineers and engineering leaders who build, deploy, and scale software systems.

Applying AI tools and techniques to professional workflows — assign alongside more specific AI topics.

Getting promoted, navigating job transitions, and advancing to the next level in your career.

Break Into Forward Deployed Engineering

What you'll learn

Why this topic matters

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle