Anthropic FDE Kevin Bai's 'FDE 101' Talk: When Do Companies Actually Need FDEs?
xiaohu · x · 2026-09-17
Blogger xiaohu recommends "FDE 101", a talk by Kevin Bai of Anthropic's FDE team at AI Engineer World's Fair, calling it the best content on the Forward Deployed Engineer role.
The talk covers what an FDE is, why companies need them, and why he believes the AI era will push more companies to adopt the role — plus practical gates: when a company truly needs FDEs, and the two gates to pass before building an FDE team.
Kevin Bai previously worked in similar roles at Palantir, then joined Rippling as the first FDE, scaling that team to 25 people within a year.
Related event: Anthropic engineer's FDE 101 talk breaks down the Palantir playbook(4 posts)→
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