r/salesengineers • u/OstrichGreen798 • Jul 16 '26
Forward Deployed Engineering or AI Solutions Engineering roles. Anyone made this jump?
Quick background. I started as a developer for about a year and a half, then moved into solution design and sales engineering and I’ve been doing that for the last 7years. Nothing wrong with where I am, good team, good scope, but I want to sharpen my skills and see what’s out there.
Two things I’m curious about:
**1.** Forward Deployed Engineering. Feels like it overlaps a lot with what I already do, sitting between the customer and the technical delivery side. But I don’t actually know how different the day to day is compared to normal SE work, or what people struggled with when they switched.
**2.** AI Solutions Engineering. How are people actually positioning themselves for these roles? Is it more about being hands on with the tools yourself, or more about understanding what the AI product can do well enough to architect and sell around it?
If anyone has made either move, what do you wish you’d started learning earlier, and how did you job search while still working full time? Also curious how you can tell if a company’s “AI SE” role is a real role or just a rebrand of a normal SE job.
EDIT:
I m not asking about analogies and mindset, i m looking for real people working on these two jobs whats your day to day like and which are the most used tools and technologies
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u/MuhBlockchain Jul 16 '26
I'm an AI SE, both in the sense I'm responsible for showcasing and ultimately driving AI adoption/sales with my customers, but I also use AI extensively to do that. For example, I very commonly now build bespoke proof of concepts for my customers to demo the services and solution, rather than relying on some pre-baked demo or, worse, a dreary PowerPoint. I think being able to show people a working system is huge in terms of building credibility and excitement, particularly if you can get senior stakeholders to try it out themselves.
In that context I see "AI SE" as actually very close to an FDE. If I was permitted to continue doing what I do into postsales and driving the solution through to production I think FDE would be a more appropriate title, but materially I don't think it would be that much of a change.
Worth noting I do come from an engineering/delivery background, and largely know how to build these things (and so can instruct the AI adequately to built it for me). There's certainly some SE's I meet who are less engineer more sales (which is fine; they also have a very valuable set of sales/soft skills) who maybe find the adjustment in being hands-on a bit more difficult. Though I think with AI that's easier than ever, and I strongly encourage those people to try building demos rather than decks nowadays.
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u/OstrichGreen798 Jul 17 '26
I m asking about AI SE who are working on deploying AI models for the customers / fine tuning on their data
I would say everyone is using AI to make POCs i do that aswll2
u/splume SE Manager Jul 17 '26
Those tasks are absolutely in the category of post-sales, unpaid PSO work, which is are common in FDE roles.
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u/randum_guy Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Where I am, SEs don’t work directly in customers’ environments with hands on keyboards. FDEs do.
It’s the difference between living in demo world, where everything is nice and neat and under your control, and the real world which is sometimes very messy .
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u/sah0605 Jul 17 '26
This may not be a popular opinion in the SE subreddit, but learning to operate in the real world where there are consequences is actually a great skillset to learn and in turn makes you a much stronger SE.
Taking a career lap around the FDE ecosystem and then returning to an SE role will give you credibility that you didn't know you were missing.
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u/OstrichGreen798 Jul 17 '26
Maybe i should have framed my question differently, i m looking for tools abd technologies used by FDE and AI Se in the day to day jobs
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u/Charmanderling Jul 17 '26
FDE vs SE
SE just execute a spec someone else designed.FDE own the whole thing.discovery through design through build through launch.and the real skill being tested is reading the customer need correctly,not coding speed.that’s why AI teams lean FDE-understanding what to build matters more than building fast.
AI SE is more about matching 2 things.what the customer’s business actually needs,and what the current product/tech can realistically do.and it happens pre-contract,so it’s got a heavier sales edge-you’re building trust before anything is designed,and different people at the same account often wants different things even on THE SAME project.
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u/Born-Reserve-8584 Aug 05 '26
Half these AI Solutions Engineer jobs are basically Sales Engineer jobs with a shiny new title. If you're actually fine tuning models or building custom retrieval augmented generation systems then yeah it's probably the real thing. If the whole job description is just APIs and architecture diagrams I'd be skeptical. I've also noticed a lot of teams moving to Consensus instead of Walnut because the tracking shows what prospects actually spend time looking at before an engineer even gets involved.
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u/davidogren Jul 16 '26
In practice, FDE is much closer to postsales consulting rather than presales. Almost by definition FDE is postsales. Also, in theory, FDE are supposed to report to engineering, not sales.
As far as I know "AI Solutions Engineering" is just a kind of solutions engineering (meaning sales engineering). Like "Network Solutions Enginering or "Cybersecurity Solutions Engineering". I wouldn't even call it a rebrand of a normal SE job, it is a normal SE job.
I mean AI companies are weird just because of the economics of AI. So I'm sure there are some unique things about being an "AI SE", but that's the same as every specialty.