A Day in the Life of a Forward-Deployed Engineer

**Brian Gracely** (0:04)
Good morning, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome back to The Enterprise AI Show. I'm your host, Brian Gracely. And today we've got a fun one. We are going to dig into a couple of topics that we cover a lot on the show, but I don't know that we've necessarily sort of dug into the, well, what's it like in reality? And so we're going to do that with both digging into forward deployed engineering, as well as harness engineering, and do that with some folks that are building new cool technology, as well as living this life, and sort of understanding what it really means to implement some of these technologies. So some good stuff coming up right after the break.
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We've talked a lot, at least in theory, about a couple of topics that we're going to dive in today, both forward-deployed engineer and forward-deployed engineering, as well as AI harness and sort of harness engineering, things that we've talked about somewhat. I feel like we've talked about them somewhat in theory, and today we get a chance to dive in to talk with somebody who is doing this live, who is doing this as their everyday day job. So, excited to have Jordan Cabb with us, staff forward-deployed engineer for AI R&D at Mozilla. Jordan, welcome to the show. Great to have you on.

**Jordan Cabb** (3:04)
Yeah, thanks, Ben. Great to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

**Brian Gracely** (3:07)
Yeah. So, we get a double bonus. You're also back in the Raleigh area, so we always like to reach out to folks who are near Aaron and I, and I've been doing this for a while. So, before we dive into kind of what you're doing every day in your day job, as well as some of the cool stuff you're doing at Mozilla, give us a little bit of your background. You've worked in a lot of places, a lot of different roles, but kind of a little bit of your background and then what you're focused on these days.

**Jordan Cabb** (3:31)
Yeah, yeah, sure. Great to be back in Raleigh. I grew up here, went to school here. I've been a software engineer kind of into computers since I was a little kid, like 12, 13 years old. That's how I got started. I like to joke that I was very much an indoor kid, if you will.
But tried to start a couple of companies when I was in middle school, high school, which is not a great time to do it, but I definitely tried.
Got kind of burnt out right before college, studied political science, which is kind of a strange twist. Went and worked in politics for a little bit and found out that I much more enjoy tech than having a product other than working in politics. So after college, went and worked in FinTech, social media, I worked for a medical device company that made medical devices for veterinarians. I kind of had no focus, right? I was living in New York at the time. This was 2023, ChatGPT 3, I think, had just come out. And it blew up the internet, it blew up, it was all anybody was talking about, especially in my circles. So my brother called me, again, this is spring 2023, he had been a consultant at KPMG for a decade, trying to bring machine learning and AI to contracts. And he called me and he was like, hey, I'm going to quit, I'm on the partner track, but I'm going to quit and I'm going to try and start a company and do this on my own, using LLMs, do you want to join me? And I was like, I don't know, going into business with family can be kind of, you know, can be dangerous, can be sketchy, I trust my brother. I was like, you know, I'll build you a demo, I'll build you an MVP, because I know you're going to go fundraising and like, that'll be the extent of the relationship.