Forward Deployed Engineering Masterclass

Part of Forward Deployed Engineering Series

Hosted by Hamza Farooq and Priyanka Vergadia

Sun, Aug 2, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

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Featured in Lenny’s List
Forward Deployed Engineering Bootcamp for Full-Stack Developers
Hamza Farooq
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What you'll learn

The rise of FDE roles

Understand what FDE roles and why organizations like Open AI and AWS are investing billions into this role.

Develop a deep understanding of AI System design

Create system diagrams that communicate tradeoffs, security, and deployment from prototype to production.

Story telling and Prototype ideas that accelerate decisions

Transform architectures, agent workflows, and data pipelines into visuals customers instantly understand.

Why this topic matters

Forward Deployed Engineers don't just build softwares, they become trusted technical partners to customers. They translate complex AI capabilities into real-world impact by combining engineering excellence with deep customer empathy. This session explores what it takes to thrive in one of the fastest-growing roles in AI.

You'll learn from

Hamza Farooq

Founder | Ex-Google & Walmart Labs |Adjunct UCLA & UMN, SCU | Venture Partner

Hi, I’m Hamza. I’m a founder by day and a professor by night, working at the intersection of Agents and Product Design.

I started Traversaal.ai with a simple goal: to build scalable AI products for startups and enterprises that integrate smoothly into existing systems while staying flexible and cost efficient.

We’ve had the opportunity to work with Fortune 100 companies, and the lessons from those experiences are woven directly into this course.

This course brings together everything I’ve learned in practice, along with the material I teach across universities.

I still spend a lot of time writing code, you can check out my GitHub.

I also share my thoughts and learnings on how organizations should think about moving demos to production grade scale on, The Production Gap: Substack.

Priyanka Vergadia

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

I teach AI for Business at Wharton Business School. I was invited to speak at TED on the skills that matter most as AI takes over. And I've spent 15+ years in tech, inside Google and Microsoft shipping the actual AI products you're now using.

Career highlights

  • Launched Gemini Code Assist at Google Cloud Next alongside the CEO shaping the GTM strategy and positioning that defined the product
  • Advised Enterprises on AI transformation with multi-billion dollar revenue accountability
  • Led DevRel at Google growing community on youtube from 250K to 1M subscribers as Chief Evangelist reaching 2M+ views across platforms
  • Authored 2 bestselling O'Reilly books: Visualizing Google Cloud and Visualizing Generative AI read by tens of thousands of tech professionals worldwide
  • TED speaker and Wharton faculty: invited to speak on human skills in the AI era and teaching AI for Business at one of the world's top business schools
  • Founder & CEO Cloud Girl: Advise startups on building their brand awareness via developer relations

Worked at

Google
Walmart
University of Minnesota
Gallup
Zoho
See all products from Hamza

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