FDE: The $1M/Year AI Job Explained

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
I know it's crazy, but there are people making a million dollars a year as for deploy engineers. But what exactly is an FDE? I know you've probably seen it, but I feel like a lot of people aren't clear as to what it is and how they could become one. Well, in this episode, I brought on my friend Vas, and Vas is a leading expert when it comes to FDEs with his company, Varick Agents.
And in this episode, he gives you his entire playbook, How You Could Become an FDE in 30 Days. Now, this episode is for people who want to become an FDE, but also for people who are just interested in what it means, how they can actually use FDEs in their business to make more money, to be more productive. And I just think this is the clearest episode, the clearest piece of content on the internet, the clearest masterclass for how to understand clearly what an FDE is, how you could become one, and why it matters. Enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end.
Vas is here, and Vas, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

**Vas** (1:20)
They're going to learn exactly how to break into forward deploy engineering, or become a better FTE in 30 days. The full roadmap for AI forward deploy engineering.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:28)
And I don't feel like this has been shared anywhere. I feel like the term forward deploy engineer is just on my ex-feed everywhere. So what I'm hoping for, Vas, is for you to clearly explain what this means, and just like all the concepts to it, and just break it down for me in a clear, easy to understand way, so I could learn from it, so others can learn from it too.

**Vas** (1:55)
Absolutely. And there's a lot of different definitions. Everyone has their own. And I'm going to give you what I think is the clearest explanation.

**Greg Isenberg** (2:01)
Okay, let's do it.

**Vas** (2:02)
Sweet. So yeah, this has never been shared before. This is something our team put together.
It's how to break into FTE in 30 days.
Let's start off with recent developments and the facts of today. The reality is every company can now buy intelligence. You have a frontier model being released every single day. Just yesterday, we had Kimi 3 being released. Last week was Fable 5 or GPT 506 Soul. Every company can now buy intelligence. And the reality is intelligence is becoming commoditized. So the same foundational capabilities becoming available to anybody who can pay for it. That's most companies today. So you'll see here is a graphic where every company has access to the same foundational model. So if everyone can access it, intelligence can no longer be the mode. I think there was this huge theory that people will be priced out of intelligence and that could be the case in the future. But the reality is today, everyone has access to the same tools. If you go and talk to 50 different enterprise clients, they're all using the same stack. They're all using Claude Code, Codex. They're using Cursor for model agnosticism.
They're using GitHub Copilot. It's all the same thing. So the reality is, everyone has the same capability in terms of what intelligence tap they have access to.
So where does the advantage go? It goes into deployment. So the edge is no longer who has the intelligence, it's where, how, and why they use it. And that is the role of an AI forward deployed engineer. It's allowing companies to harness and take advantage of AI intelligence or software previously to make sure that they apply it the best to their specific company context. Every single company is different in terms of how their business is structured, what processes they have, how things run, etc. And the job of an FD is to make sure that the intelligence, which is general, is specifically applied to this company in a way that benefits them the most. And the advantage will start to become who has that best bridge, the connection between their own processes and the intelligence stack that they have access to.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:09)
And Vas, this was a term that, correct me if I'm wrong, was popularized by the Palantir team, right?

**Vas** (4:16)
That's right.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:17)
So can you tell me about how Palantir works with FDEs? I mean, I feel like for a lot of people, Palantir is this black box. Can you go a little more into that?

**Vas** (4:30)
Yeah, it's funny. So I lived in New York for a few years, and I had a ton of buddies who were Palantir forward-deployed engineers, so I have a little bit of insight into this.