I Used to Make Fun of FDEs

A friend from my old eng team texted me last Wednesday. He has an offer from Anthropic, forward deployed, embedded at a Blackstone portfolio company. Mid five hundreds, equity revisable every six months, twenty-five percent travel. He wanted to know if I would take it. He framed it as "I know this is a weird question to ask a VC."

Here's the thing. It is not a weird question. I have been thinking about that offer all week.

When I was an IC engineer, the Forward Deployed Engineer title was the office punchline. The FDE was the guy from Palantir who flew to a customer site in a fleece vest, drank coffee with a colonel for three weeks, and came back with a slide deck. The dev-track engineers on my team made jokes about it. I made jokes about it. We treated FDE as the parking lot for people who could not pass the systems interview.

That joke is over.

Then five and a half billion landed.

On May 4th, Anthropic announced a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman and Friedman, Goldman, Apollo, General Atlantic, GIC, and Sequoia. The pitch is forward deployed engineers embedded at PE-portfolio companies. Three hundred million in founding capital. Customers prebooked through LP relationships before a single line of code gets written.

Seven days later, OpenAI raised $4 billion for The Deployment Company, anchored by TPG, with Advent, Bain, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners. Nineteen investors on the cap table. They acquired Tomoro, a small applied AI consultancy with about 150 engineers and a customer list that includes Tesco, Virgin Atlantic, and Supercell. Same playbook. Same role. Conviction enough to bet a billion on it twice in seven days.

Job listings for FDE are up 800% this year. Mid-level total comp is $300K to $450K. Senior is $450K to $550K. Staff clears $600K. Add the AI premium and the equity revisions and you get a number that, in early 2024, was what you paid the L6 backend engineer who actually understood the database at a FAANG.

The role is no longer the parking lot. The labs bought the lot, the building, and put the title on the cap table.

This is the third crossing.

I crossed a couple years ago. SWE to VC. It was lonely for a year. I lost the daily customer feedback loop. I gained the partner meetings, the deal flow, and the constant low hum of wanting to open the editor instead. Frankly, I still miss the build.

The crossing my friend is making is different. He is not leaving engineering. He is choosing a version of engineering where the customer's problem is the spec. Where the work is mostly integration, eval frameworks, MCP servers, sub-agents, and what Anthropic in its job posting actually calls "white glove deployment." Where the win condition is a business metric, not a release note.

For ten years, the SWE career had two acceptable exits. You ride the IC ladder to staff and beyond, or you take the founder seat and hope you picked the right idea. Everything else was a softer track. PM was softer. Solutions was the title for engineers who liked customers more than codebases. And FDE was the punchline.

Three things changed at once. Customers got tired of waiting and started paying cash for embedded help. The models crossed the bar where integration is the moat, not the model itself. And the labs finally noticed McKinsey was eating the consulting margin for free. So they raised five and a half billion dollars in two weeks and started hiring the embed.

Here's the deal. The third path is now an acceptable answer to "what are you doing with your career." Maybe the most acceptable one.

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The seat I am sitting in does not look as good as it did.

Honestly, I have been pricing this in my head all week. Not the comp. The comp is a wash with my current seat once I account for vest schedules and the bump for managing a portfolio. The thing I am pricing is the work.

Every FDE I have ever talked to has the same look. The look of someone who knows what their customer's pipeline does because they wrote it, then debugged it at 11pm in a hotel. The look of someone who shipped against a real constraint in the last 72 hours. The look I had a couple years ago.

The VC seat I am in is good. The view is wide. I get to look at twenty companies a week. I still ship code. But none of it carries the weight of a customer waiting on it. None of it is the 2am call because a real eval pipeline is segfaulting in production. And none of the metrics I move belong to someone whose quarter depends on them.

So when my friend asked me whether to take the Anthropic offer, here is what I told him. Take it. Take it for the work, not for the title, and definitely not for the equity revisions, which will be revised against you the moment private secondary pricing softens. The work is the thing. Always has been.

What I did not tell him is that I was a little jealous typing that out.

The Palantir title won. I am not sure that I did.

— SWEdonym