The Forward Deployed Engineer

Chapter 1. The Founder Inside Someone Else’s Company

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The Slack message arrived at 4am, and I was out, nowhere near a laptop, when my phone lit up with the name of the customer’s engineering director. The pipeline I had built for them, a data sync holding two companies’ systems together through a merger, had shipped clean and run clean. Now, hours after a sync, user data was landing misaligned. It was an alarm.

The failure was downstream of my work, in a process that was not mine, but I was the only person who could see the whole picture. Their engineering team was awake and lost; they had not built any of it. Their Customer Experience (CX) team was awake and willing; they could not read what they were looking at. The director was awake and out of patience. And my work was, by any contract’s definition, done.

So at 4am, from my phone, I became a multitude of jobs I never applied for. The engineering manager, narrowing where it could have gone wrong. Project manager, deciding who would check ...