Heather Lewis

Cisco/Juniper/Check Point/Arista/PAN Network Security Engineer, cyclist

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

https://t.co/oW9Z1rdcE4

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

One of the new, buzzy jobs in Silicon Valley is the AI Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), an engineer who is embedded within a client organization to help customize solutions, such as building and tuning agentic workflows that suit the client’s particular needs. I’ve heard from people who are wondering anew about the FDE career path since OpenAI and Anthropic started building new teams to place FDEs within client organizations.

The rise of FDEs for AI workloads is one way AI is creating new jobs (and why the jobpolcalypse narrative of upcoming job market collapse is false -- there will be many AI and non-AI jobs). However, I believe there will be far more AI Engineer jobs than FDEs, as I explain below.

The FDE role was pioneered about two decades ago by Palantir, which sent engineers to government locations to work on secure, air-gapped networks. In addition to having good technical skills, FDEs need communication skills and sometimes business skills. For example, they may need to speak with clients to understand their needs, formulate a strategy to prioritize projects, explain complex technology, and respectfully push back if a client asks for something unrealistic. They’re enjoying a resurgence because of the amount of work involved in taking an off-the-shelf LLM and building it into a custom agentic workflow that fits particular business needs.

However, I believe the number of AI Engineer jobs will be far larger. A company might accept a few FDEs to be embedded within its organization. But most companies will want far more of their own employees working on their projects. While my organizations do hire FDEs, we hire far more AI Engineers! Also, a common client concern is that it is hard to find vendor-neutral FDEs — they are, after all, there to deeply integrate a particular vendor’s product into a company. In this moment when it’s hard to predict which AI service will be the best one in a year’s time, optionality (the ability to pick whatever vendor turns out to fit best in the future) is very valuable. In contrast, letting FDEs tightly bind a company’s processes significantly reduces optionality.

Right now, I see surging demand for AI Engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompting, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode). As the AI Engineer role matures, I expect it to fragment into more specialized roles, like the generic Software Engineer role from decades ago fragmented into frontend, backend, mobile, data engineering, devops, and so on.

What will be the future, specialized AI engineering roles? I don’t know. Perhaps there will be AI FDEs, LLMOps Engineers, Evals Engineers, AI Data Engineers, Harness Engineers, and other roles we don’t have names for yet. But for now, I see a lot of AI engineers who are generalists create a lot of value. Skilled AI Engineers are in very high demand! As our field continues to mature over the coming decade, I look forward to new specializations within AI Engineering that create even more job opportunities.

[Original text: The Batch newsletter]

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

OWASP Agent Memory Guard: Stop AI agents from being weaponized through their own memory https://t.co/ibBlNXx0sR

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

SAML: How It Works, Common Misconfigurations, and Security Implications https://t.co/iTquflSB7V

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on the AI revolution, job losses and what drives him | Full interview https://t.co/OwjOgOf9MQ

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Why BMP Statistics Matter https://t.co/OwPEsx4BHj

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Real-Time NetOps: Event-Driven Ansible meets your network source of truth, co-hosted in partnership with NetBox Labs and Red Hat. All webinars are available on-demand after the live event. https://t.co/vMOj7uoJAf

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Are we hiring for the wrong thing? https://t.co/GrgWTNjdPx

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Downtime has become a $600 billion business problem https://t.co/xb25njQG2c

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

https://t.co/SjGCwlBreZ

[sysxplore @sysxplore]

How traceroute works?

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Wifi Access Point Hardware Layers: Technical Overview for Network Engineers https://t.co/0lZywF1K4T

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

Check out the Tackling the CWNA certification (as a wireless noob) guidance and followup from Packet Pushers https://t.co/BEiEORgaBB #cisco #wireless #cwna #cwnp

[Mashood tried Ops @fromcodetocloud]

Most Important Linux files🐤

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet https://t.co/ybJSDUYnFE

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

ISP help desk manager fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke https://t.co/YmhbKSeVSO

[Sahn Lam @sahnlam]

Understanding OAuth

OAuth is an open standard that allows users to grant limited access to their data on one site to other sites or applications without exposing their passwords. It has become the backbone of secure authorization across the web and mobile apps.

The OAuth ecosystem

OAuth connects three main players:

- The User who wants to grant access to their data without sharing login credentials
- The Server that hosts the user's data and provides access tokens
- The Identity Provider (IdP) that authenticates the user's identity and issues tokens

How OAuth works

When a user tries to access their data through a third-party app, they are redirected to log in through the IdP. The IdP sends an access token to the app, which presents it to the server. Recognizing the valid token, the server grants access.

The OAuth flows

OAuth 2.0 defines four flows for obtaining authorization tokens:

- Authorization Code Flow - for server-side applications
- Client Credentials Flow - when the app is the resource owner
- Implicit Code Flow - not secure and no longer recommended
- Resource Owner Flow - for trusted apps using owner credentials

Key benefits

- Enhances user experience by eliminating multiple passwords
- Allows secure data access across platforms using tokens
- Balances accessibility and security

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[Ranju @whatRanjuSaid]

AWS, AZURE outage

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

LinkedIn gives you until Monday to stop AI from training on your profile https://t.co/GVGFeU4iZZ #linkedin #ai #automation #privacy

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

October Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Fixes 6 Zero-Days, Including 4 Actively Exploited Flaws, as Windows 10 Reaches End-of-Life https://t.co/2yJoMB56CE

[Heather Lewis @hlncchl]

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line https://t.co/QcBq9gqSDr