On the customer floor
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
Sit with one customer. Map the messy Tuesday. Ship a narrow slice with a human gate. Hand it over. Feed the product team at home.
3–4 weeks of evenings · 20 lessons · live 6-room floor · 1 clinic install
0/20 lessons on this path
US
$140K–$250K+
Canada
CA$120K–$180K+
India
₹25–60 LPA+ (labs / GCC)
What this path is (and is not)
This is the 2026 FDE job in miniature: you embed at Harbour Clinic, pick one Tuesday pain, map verbs, run a slice on their notes, score gold cases, hold send for Priya, and leave a before/after card. Enough to walk into a Palantir / OpenAI / Anthropic FDE screen. Mastery is still ten real floors after this one.
Live job desk
Harbour Clinic · six rooms
Today you are the FDE. Priya is ops. Arun is backup. Pick → map → run → eval → gate → card. All six must go green. Then run the same desk in the build studio.
- 1 · Pick — one Tuesday note
- 2 · Map — star drafts only
- 3 · Run — their folder
- 4 · Eval — gold is the contract
- 5 · Gate — Priya sends
- 6 · Card — 6h → 2h
Five rungs · borrowed desk → your desk
0/5 lit
- 1See the job in one filmOne sentence. A short film. You can say FDE back without a slide.
- 2Pass the borrowed deskHarbour Clinic. Priya. Six rooms. Training wheels — still a real judgment.
- 3Run it on your TuesdayPaste three notes from your week. Student, clerk, or engineer — your folder is the lab.
- 4Speak in the roomThree FDE mocks. Judgment scored. Then you are not guessing the interview.
- 5Ship a line from YOUR hoursVerb, object, number — from the desk you just ran. That line is what you send.
When you may apply — said plainly
Rungs 1–3 green: you may apply to associate FDE, internal AI deployer, or ‘the AI person’ on your team. You can do a first supervised slice. Rungs 4–5 green: you can walk into the screen calm. OpenAI / Palantir still want code years we cannot mint in an evening. We get you into an AI role. We do not mint a staff FDE overnight.
Mastery syllabus
1 · What this job is
Not a slide. Not back-office SWE. Floor, slice, feed home.
2 · Discovery — pick and say no
High pain, low risk, one folder, named sender. The customer will ask for everything.
3 · Map the Tuesday
Verbs. Star drafts. Priya is the gate. CEO-every-time is theatre.
4 · Install the slice
Their notes, not Wikipedia. Cite or refuse. Gold cases are the contract.
5 · Gate, card, leave
Hold for Priya. Hours not vibes. They run it next week.
6 · Integrity and the room
No secret files in a public model. A 90-second story. A five-line miss.
Simulation labs
Harbour Clinic floor
Six rooms. All green. This is the job.
Open the labFirst workflow
Score pain vs risk.
Open the labRun on their notes
Cite or refuse. Invention blocked.
Open the labGold as contract
Grounded, refuse, or lie — in the room.
Open the labHours card
Before 6h → after 2h.
Open the labHold for Priya
Auto-send is an FDE miss.
Open the lab
The project that hires
Harbour Clinic install you can defend in a screen
- Pass all six rooms on the live floor (pick, map, run, eval, gate, card).
- Write the napkin map: verbs, stars, Priya as send, Arun as backup.
- Keep one refused answer (Education Act §12) as a screenshot in the write-up.
- Put hours before/after on one card. Ship two resume lines.
- Do three FDE mocks here. Then sit with a real weekly task outside KatralAI.
Interview room
- Map a 12-step clinic process. Which four may an AI draft, and who sends?
- Walk discovery → slice → prototype on their notes → gold cases → handoff.
- Education Act §12 is not in the folder. What does the system do in the demo?
- Write four gold cases for a weekly insurance note. One must be a fluent lie.
Resume lines that hire
- Embedded with Harbour Clinic ops; shipped a weekly-note slice with a named send gate (Priya) and backup (Arun).
- Cut insurance recap time 6h → 2h; gold eval caught an invented citation before the demo left the floor.