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The forward deployed engineer is the new and hot role in AI, and most job descriptions ask for eight to twelve years of software experience. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas think that requirement is looking in the wrong place. In this episode of The Missing Manual, they make the case that the person best equipped to get a forward deployed engineer role right is often a great recruiter who has never written a line of code.
A forward deployed engineer gets to know a specific user's problem in full, understands its one-size-fits-one nature, then reverse-engineers a build to solve it and ships it into that user's world. Jenny walks through the double diamond design model that sits underneath the work, where you define the right thing before you build the thing right. Her own aha moment is the heart of the episode. The eight to twelve years of experience she has for this role did not come from software. It came from talent acquisition, where you work with a hiring manager to define what right looks like, then go find that person in the wild.
Julia adds the piece that makes or breaks it. Design bias is the wall. The people who have already decided how a problem should be solved cannot see the problem clearly enough to solve it, and a career insider who has done everything the same way for years can be the most stuck of all. The two of them name the recruiter traits that map directly onto the FDE skill set, from tactical empathy to building relationships across departments to deconstructing a role into the parts that actually matter. They point to sourcers like Shally Steckerl who were doing this work before the title existed.
For HR and TA leaders, the takeaway is practical. Before you hire an engineer, look at the full-cycle recruiter or sourcer you already have, because the business to technical translation this role runs on is a skill your best people are already using. The Missing Manual exists to hand you the how that never makes it into the manual, and this episode gives you a clear way to find forward deployed engineer talent inside your own team. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.
