Prashanth

Product designer, product manager for people management, health benefits management and financial services products. Entrepreneur. Author.

[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]

[Prashanth @sprabu]

Sign up to Prepare for Vibe Coding Assignments in PM Interviews!

Check out this free Lightning Lesson on Maven 👇

https://t.co/0uiqsHkihR

[Prashanth @sprabu]

Vibe Coding for Product Managers is now open for enrollment. https://t.co/Bl5W1wyQGg

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AI Prototyping for Product Managers https://t.co/RdVwg4tl3V via @YouTube

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AI Driven Automation: The Threat and The Opportunity https://t.co/1UaV9SGRMF

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Designing the machine that makes the machine https://t.co/1uXSShSGmb

[Prashanth @sprabu]

In product management, a Product Definition Document (PDD) serves as more than just a roadmap—it's a crucial foundation for team alignment and strategic collaboration.
https://t.co/WpeTwNWXhI

[Prashanth @sprabu]

I just started a Substack on product management. You can subscribe to it here https://t.co/OlWwUn3WbX

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Design-led Innovation Makes a Business Powerful https://t.co/Jr8KTqsFEC

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Purpose and Anatomy of an Effective Concept Story https://t.co/lUh8bPf5UZ

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Testing Dropbox Fax

[Prashanth @sprabu]

We are very close to building Chatbots for business using plain English. In this video, I show you what is possible today.

[Prashanth @sprabu]

A very useful course to understand prompt engineering. I recommended it for my product and engineering colleagues.

[Isa Fulford @isafulf]

It was an honor to collaborate and teach with @AndrewYNg, the legend. Let us know what you think!

[Prashanth @sprabu]

I asked ChatGPT to write a job description for Chief Product Officer. This job description suits any senior product leader responsible for a product area. I did not edit the description. Product leaders might find it interesting. https://t.co/9Wj1Yhd2qS

[Bob Sutton @work_matters]

Adam nails it. Writing sentences (not lists or bullet points), editing, getting feedback, revising again, and improving the logic, language, and flow makes fuzzy ideas clear. And can guide effective action.

As the old saying goes, my best thoughts are second thoughts.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Moving your team from slides to long form writing is not just a process change. It is first and foremost a culture change.

A writing culture values comprehension over aesthetics, nuance over certainty, clarity over charisma, deliberation over impulse, and rigor over hierarchy.

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Education system:

[Robert Stewart @wombatnation]

This article on healthcare pricing in Northern California is ... accurate. I've seen the data. https://t.co/uY6XO95MPV

[Prashanth @sprabu]

@chirag_mehta @Product_Craft @vendorprisey @Pragmaticmkting While at SAP I always enjoyed @vendorprisey 's presentations on designing Employee Central. The first one in Amsterdam was the best because he ignored the SAP presentation template and broke all the brand rules.

[Prashanth @sprabu]

@chirag_mehta @Product_Craft @vendorprisey @Pragmaticmkting Thanks @chirag_mehta Natalie from @Product_Craft reached out.