The FDE Coach blog · new articles every day
Practical guides for engineers who ship AI.
Step-by-step builds with free AI tools, what just shipped in AI and why it matters, and Forward Deployed Engineer playbooks on interviews, pay and client work.
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Guides
Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer: What Is It and What Do FDEs Do?
Palantir FDEs are hybrid software engineers and field operators who embed with customers to solve critical mission problems. Learn the role, daily life, and skills required.
11 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Salary South Africa: 2025 Market Rates & Equity Breakdown
Real data on Forward Deployed Engineer salary in South Africa. Covers ZAR base pay, equity, remote premium, and how FDE comp stacks against traditional engineering roles.
12 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Learning Path: Skills, Projects, and Core Competencies
Master the forward deployed engineer learning path with this high-signal guide. Covers essential skills, real-world projects, and the core competencies needed to break into the hottest AI role of 2026.
9 min read
Guides
What Do Palantir FDEs Do? The Real Daily Grind, Embedding, and Shipping
Palantir FDEs are engineers who parachute into chaos to ship software. Learn the daily reality, how embedding works, and the difference between FDEs and FDSEs.
11 min read
Forward Deployed
FDE vs Solutions Engineer vs Sales Engineer: Responsibilities and Boundaries
A concrete breakdown of Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, and Sales Engineer roles: where they overlap, where they diverge, and how to navigate the boundary lines in high-stakes technical sales.
14 min read
Forward Deployed
From Messy Problem to Shipped Prototype: The FDE Weekly Workflow
A concrete playbook for the Forward Deployed Engineer's weekly sprint: how to scope ambiguous customer pain, build a high-signal prototype, and navigate enterprise constraints without burning the week on polish.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
The FDE Interview Loop: Systems Design, Deployment, and Customer Empathy Prep
A concrete playbook for the Forward Deployed Engineer interview covering the deployment debugging gauntlet, customer empathy scenarios, and system design trade-offs. Real workflows, no hype.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
From Messy Problem to Shipped Prototype: The FDE Weekly Workflow
A concrete, week-in-the-life playbook for Forward Deployed Engineers. See how to take a vague enterprise customer pain point, scope it ruthlessly, build a prototype with real tools like n8n and Postgres, and present a path to production—all in 5 days.
9 min read
Forward Deployed
Debugging in the Dark: How FDEs Solve Customer Issues Without Environment Access
A Forward Deployed Engineer's playbook for diagnosing production issues when you can't touch the environment. From log forensics to USB debugging on broken screens, learn the high-signal workflows that turn black-box failures into solved cases.
12 min read
Forward Deployed
Case Study: Deploying an LLM Feature at a Risk-Averse Enterprise Customer
A step-by-step engineering breakdown of shipping a customer-facing LLM summarization feature inside a Fortune 500 bank. Covers air-gapped deployment, RAG architecture, hallucination guardrails, and the FDE comp context.
8 min read
AI News
Inside the Shai-Hulud Supply Chain Attack: How Keyv and Friends Were Compromised on npm
A deep dive into the Shai-Hulud npm supply chain attack that compromised Keyv, cacheable, and other packages. Learn the technical play-by-play, why it matters for FDEs, and how to harden your pipelines.
9 min read
AI News
Shieldstral: Mistral’s 3B Open-Weights Model for Multimodal Moderation
Mistral drops Shieldstral, a 3B open-weights model for text and image moderation. Here’s why it matters for engineers building safe AI pipelines and how to run it today.
9 min read
AI News
80B Qwen on 4.3 GB RAM: How Swiftlet Quantization Works
Swiftlet quantizes an 80B Qwen model to run on a Mac with just 4.3 GB of RAM. We unpack the extreme compression techniques, why this matters for FDEs building local-first AI, and how to try it today.
9 min read
AI News
DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X: Inference Engineering Deep Dive
A technical walkthrough of running the massive DeepSeek V4 Flash model on a single AMD MI300X GPU. We break down the quantization and KV-cache wizardry that makes this possible, and what it means for forward-deployed inference engineering.
8 min read
AI News
The Engineering Cost of AI-Generated Blog Images on Reader Trust and UX
AI-generated images are eroding reader trust and tanking content UX. We break down the engineering psychology behind the backlash and provide a high-signal workflow for authentic visual assets.
10 min read
Build Guides
Build a SQL Analyst Agent with Gemini and Postgres for Free
Build a natural-language SQL analyst that introspects your Postgres schema, generates queries via Google Gemini's free tier, and returns results. Step-by-step guide with code.
11 min read
Build Guides
Generate Anki Flashcards from Lecture Notes with Ollama & LangChain
Build a local, zero-cost Python tool that chunks Markdown lecture notes and uses a local LLM via Ollama to generate Anki-compatible Q&A flashcards. No API keys, no cloud costs.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build an On-Call Incident Summarizer with Cloudflare Workers AI
Build a free serverless function that accepts raw logs, uses Cloudflare Workers AI to summarize incidents, and drafts structured postmortems in Markdown. Copy-pasteable guide for engineers.
11 min read
Build Guides
Build a Discord FAQ Bot with n8n, Supabase pgvector, and Gemini
Ship a Discord community bot that answers questions from your docs using free-tier tools. Wire n8n webhooks to Supabase vector search and Google Gemini for RAG responses.
10 min read
Guides
Forward Deployed Engineer Remote Jobs: Flexibility in a Travel Role
Discover how to land forward deployed engineer remote jobs. We decode the hybrid reality, required skills, top hiring companies, and salary data for FDEs seeking location flexibility.
9 min read
Guides
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer at Rippling: Salary & Equity Deep Dive
Unpack the Senior Forward Deployed Engineer salary at Rippling. We break down base pay, equity ranges from $207K to $779K+, and the technical skills that drive top-of-band offers.
7 min read
Guides
Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer Salary India: Base, Bonus & Equity Breakdown
Deep dive into Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer salary in India for 2025: base pay, performance bonuses, equity grants, and how FDSE comp compares to FAANG.
9 min read
Guides
Palantir FDE LeetCode: How Much Coding to Expect in Your Interview
Cut through the noise: Palantir FDE coding interviews rarely require LeetCode hards. Learn exactly what DSA patterns, system design depth, and debugging skills actually matter.
9 min read
Guides
Google FDE Interview Questions: Mastering Technical Depth & Customer Empathy
A tactical guide to Google FDE interview questions covering coding, system design, and customer empathy. Learn the exact loop, sample answers, and prep strategy.
10 min read
1,162 articles and counting