Forward deployed engineers · California
Senior engineers who embed with your customers, build the integrations your deployments stall on, and ship against real data — working your full Pacific business day. Top 5% of more than a thousand applicants per cycle, evidence-checked before you meet them.
20 minutes
To meet an available pre-vetted engineer, subject to availability
About 14 days
For a deliberate best-fit placement
Week two
Target for the first pull request
The role
A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a senior software engineer who works embedded with a customer rather than behind a ticket queue. They sit in the customer's workflows, integrate with real systems and data, write production code on site or over the customer's own hours, and stay accountable for the outcome until the software works in the customer's environment.
The role was popularised by Palantir and is now common at AI and enterprise-software companies, where the gap between a demo and a working deployment is the hardest part of the sale.
An FDE is part software engineer, part solutions architect and part customer-facing problem solver. The mix is unusual, which is why the role is hard to hire for — and why we screen for communication and judgement as deliberately as we screen for code.
Background reading: Palantir on a day in the life of a forward deployed software engineer.
| Forward deployed engineer | In-house staff engineer | Outsourced contractor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the work happens | Inside the customer's environment, systems and data | Inside your own product team and backlog | In a separate scope, delivered back to you |
| Main measure of success | The deployment works for the customer | Roadmap tickets ship | The agreed scope is delivered |
| Customer contact | Direct and constant | Occasional, through product | Usually none |
| Typical seniority | Senior, able to make calls without escalation | Mid to senior | Varies by scope |
| Feedback into product | Carries field learnings back to engineering | Built into the team already | Rarely |
Signals
Your product demos well, then dies in a two-month integration. An FDE lives inside that integration until the pilot converts.
Models behave differently on a customer's data than on yours. An FDE tunes pipelines, evaluations and prompts against the real thing.
Each customer needs different connectors, auth and data shapes. An FDE builds those without pulling your core team off the roadmap.
When the answer to an objection is a working feature, you need someone who can write and deploy it in the room.
Responsibilities
Join their standups, channels and tooling, and learn the domain well enough to propose solutions rather than wait for specs.
Connectors, authentication, data ingestion and the plumbing between your product and whatever the customer already runs.
Write production code against the customer's actual systems, not a sanitised sandbox, and handle what that exposes.
Diagnose live issues calmly with stakeholders watching, and explain the fix in language the buyer understands.
Turn recurring field workarounds into product requirements so the next deployment is faster than the last.
Stay accountable until the deployment is in production and the customer's team can run it.
California
Engineers placed with California companies work your Pacific business day — your standups, your incident windows, your customer calls. No overnight handoffs.
Our forward deployed engineers work remotely and embed through your tools: Slack, Zoom, Linear or Jira, your repositories and your customer calls. We do not send engineers to client sites.
We place with startups and scale-ups across San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego and the wider Bay Area, where enterprise pilots move on weeks rather than quarters.
We sign the custom NDA approved by your lawyer for every assigned engineer before they receive access, and contract through Riseup Asia LLC in the United States.
How we filter
Designed by engineers with twenty years of leadership behind them. Most people fail at stage two.
01
1,000+ reached
Targeted campaigns across Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, India and Bangladesh.
02
20 / 1,000
An alertness, adaptiveness and aptitude screen. Twenty of every thousand get through.
03
3–5 layers
Three to five graded modules: memory training, structured note-taking, professional working habits.
04
20–25 hrs
A real two-to-three month build compressed into 20–25 hours, written by twenty-year engineering leaders.
05
2 modes
Tasks modelled on your stack, split into AI-assisted and AI-free halves. We test research ability too.
06
1 hr, no AI
One hour of live coding. No internet. No AI. A proctor present. Then negotiation and onboarding.
Only the top 5% of an assignment-stage cohort reach your shortlist.
Selected work
Products our engineers designed, built and published, alongside selected work from our Chief Software Engineer.
Alim’s past work, not with Riseup Asia.
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01
A 30-minute call about the customers you are trying to land, the systems involved and the seniority you need.
02
If someone suitable is free, you can meet them in as little as 20 minutes, subject to availability. For a deliberate best-fit match, allow about 14 days.
03
Interview and technically challenge the shortlist yourself. They have already cleared six stages of our vetting; you make the final call.
04
They join your tools and your Pacific hours, with the first pull request targeted for week two. If the fit is wrong, we replace them at no extra cost.
Reviewed by
Alim Ul Karim — Chief Software Engineer, Riseup Asia
This page is maintained by our engineering leadership, who designed the six-stage vetting funnel every engineer on this page has cleared. Meet the wider team on our leadership page or read the full vetting process.
A senior leader will assess it.
A focused 30-minute call with an engineering leader, not a salesperson. We define the technical risk, team shape and next step; scoped work receives a written proposal within 48 hours.
Direct inquiry
info@riseup-asia.com