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Observing AI in Production, Agentic SRE's & Self Healing Systems: Execs & Engineers Lunch
Dash0Utrecht
Next up Observing AI in Production, Agentic SRE's & Self Healing Systems: Execs & Engineers Lunch· Fri 30 Oct Forward Deployed.
Forward Deployed.
Based in Amsterdam.
The community for forward deployed engineers, and everyone who ships software where the customer is. Curated events, field playbooks and build nights.
Updated daily
Coming up in Amsterdam
The role
What is a forward deployed engineer?
A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who works inside a customer’s world, deploying, adapting and extending a product until it delivers measurable value.
Pioneered at Palantir and now central to how AI companies go to market, the role sits where engineering, product and customer success meet. As agents move from demos to production, the people who can make them work on messy, real systems are the bottleneck.
Read the full guide →×01
Embedded
Works on-site or in the customer’s stack, not behind a ticket queue.
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Ships production code
Integrations, agents, data pipelines: real software, not slideware.
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Closes the loop
Turns field pain into product: the fastest feedback channel a company has.
What we do
A field guild, not a mailing list.
Four things, done properly. Everything is free, and everything is built for people who deploy for a living.
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Curated events
The AI, platform and go-to-market events worth your evening — updated daily, filtered for builders.
Browse events 02Field playbooks
How deployments actually go: scoping, first 30 days, agents on apps you don’t control, and the career path.
Read playbooks 03Build nights
Small, hands-on sessions. Bring a laptop, leave with a working agentic workflow and people you’ll call next week.
Get invited 04Partner network
For FDEs and MSPs who deploy for others: tooling, referrals and a path to building a practice on top of it.
Become a partnerBuild nights
Agents on the live web, with a human in the loop.
Most valuable workflows run on web apps you don’t own and can’t change. At our build nights we automate real web journeys: agents and people working in the same session, sensitive fields masked, every action audited.
- Automate a multi-step journey on a third-party SaaS
- Hand off between agent and human mid-session
- Deploy it for a customer without touching their code
Sessions run on Webfuse, the web augmentation platform from Amsterdam.
Playbooks
Written from the field.
Field playbook11 min
Deploying AI Agents on Web Apps You Don't Control
When an AI agent must work inside a customer's or third party's web application and you cannot change its code or get an API, you have five main options: an official API or MCP server if one exists, RPA, headless or remote browsers, browser extensions, or proxy-based web augmentation that runs in the user's own browser session. The right choice depends on whether a human is present, what credentials the agent may hold, and what the customer's security team requires for masking, audit and human oversight.
ReadComparison7 min
Forward Deployed Engineer vs Solutions Engineer: What's the Difference?
A solutions engineer helps a customer decide to buy and adopt a product, mostly through demos, technical discovery and proofs of concept. A forward deployed engineer builds the production solution for a specific customer after that decision, writing and owning real code inside the customer's environment. Sales engineers, consultants and software engineers sit at different points on the same spectrum of customer proximity and code ownership.
ReadCareer8 min
How to Become a Forward Deployed Engineer
To become a forward deployed engineer, you need production-level engineering skills (most often Python or TypeScript, cloud, data integration and increasingly LLM and agent development) plus evidence that you can scope ambiguous customer problems and ship under real constraints. Most FDEs arrive from software, solutions or data engineering, and interviews test problem decomposition, practical coding and customer judgment more than algorithm puzzles.
ReadFAQ
Questions, answered.
- What is a forward deployed engineer?
- A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a software engineer who works directly inside a customer's environment to deploy, adapt and extend a product until it delivers real value. They write production code, own the technical relationship, and feed what they learn back to the core product team.
- Who is FDE Amsterdam for?
- Forward deployed engineers, solutions and sales engineers, deployment strategists, technical founders and MSPs in Amsterdam and the wider Randstad: anyone whose job is making software work in a real customer's world.
- Which events do you list?
- We collect public event listings every day and keep the ones relevant to people who build and deploy software: AI agents, LLMs, platform engineering, hackathons, engineering leadership and go-to-market. Every listing links to the organiser's original page.
- Is it free?
- Yes. Membership, our playbooks and our own meetups are free. FDE Amsterdam is an independent community initiated and supported by Webfuse.
Ship with people who get it.
Monthly meetups, build nights and a group chat full of engineers who deploy for a living. Free, Amsterdam-based, no recruiters.