Break Into Forward Deployed Engineering

Part of Accelerate Your Career

Hosted by Paden Gayle and Reyhan Merekar

Sat, Aug 15, 2026

12:00 AM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

What you'll learn

What FDEs actually do all day

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

What FDE hiring loops screen for

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

Reposition your resume for AI roles

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

Why this topic matters

FDE is one of the fastest-growing roles in AI, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer work, and it pays accordingly. But hiring is opaque and most advice comes from people who have never done the job. Learn what the role really is, whether it fits you, and how to position your experience for it, from two engineers who built careers across Notion, Google, Bloomberg, and Accentu

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle

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

I'm a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Notion, where I built the technical delivery model our team uses to run high-stakes enterprise migrations. I'm also writing The Forward Deployed Engineer's Handbook for O'Reilly, the first definitive guide to the role.

Before Notion I was a Software Engineer at Google and Bloomberg, building certificate authority infrastructure and large-scale data platforms. I've also coached 600+ engineers through career transitions into top companies.

I teach this because I'm doing the job right now, not summarizing it from articles. Everything in my workshops comes from live engagements: real scoping decisions, real security reviews, real stakeholder fights. If you want to break into Applied AI, learn it from the trenches.

Reyhan Merekar

AI Engineering Manager @ Accenture | GenAI for Fortune 500s

I'm an AI Engineering Manager at Accenture, where I design and ship AI, ML, and GenAI solutions for Fortune 500 clients. I've spent the last five years taking AI from prototype to production: building ML pipelines on GCP and Azure, leading MLOps and LLMOps practice, and launching a GenAI tool for retail marketing that hit 90 percent adoption.

Before most people knew what a large language model was, I was building with them. I believe the best time to develop real intuition for a technology is before the hype arrives, when you're just solving problems.

I also love teaching this stuff. I've taught 30+ students per cohort as a data instructor and spent 400+ hours tutoring before that. Enterprise AI has a gap between what tutorials teach and what actually ships. This is where I help you close it.

Previously at

Notion
Google
Bloomberg
Scale AI
Accenture
See all products from Paden

Sign up to join this lesson

By continuing, you agree to Maven's Terms and Privacy Policy.