Learn · Curriculum
Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap
A visual curriculum for the Delta role: ship under customer constraints across data, platform, field judgment, and production AI. Click a node to expand outcomes and sources.
“You can think of a Dev’s focus as “one capability, many customers,” while a Delta’s focus is “one customer, many capabilities.””
Curriculum adapted with attribution from Awesome FDE Roadmap (MIT), and Anthropic agent evals.
Skills map
Four tracks. Cloud examples stay vendor-neutral — treat GCP/AWS/Azure as interchangeable landing-zone patterns.
Tap a node to expand outcomes and resources below it.
1. Foundation
Data engineering — the bedrock
Foundation · node
SQL for messy reality
Window functions, recursive CTEs, EXPLAIN literacy — enough to audit a 20-year-old schema under time pressure.
Outcomes
- Profile a legacy warehouse and name the top 3 data risks
- Rewrite a slow join with a measurable cost drop
Resources
2. Platform
Cloud landing zones & secure deploy
3. Field
Consulting mindset — the Forward in FDE
4. Applied AI
RAG, agents, evals in the enterprise
30 / 90-day transition plan
Time-boxed path if you are transferring from SWE, Solutions, or consulting. Pair with How to become an FDE and the readiness check.
First 30 days
01
Map the Delta
Write three customer-constraint stories from your past work. Read Palantir Dev vs Delta once, carefully.
02
Close one hard gap
If SWE-heavy: practice discovery + scoping writeups. If SE-heavy: ship a production integration with tests and a runbook.
03
Interview primitives
One decomp case / week + one enterprise system-design sketch (SSO, data, deploy path).
Days 31–90
01
Portfolio that proves field judgment
One public or shareable artifact: Site Survey + MVA + eval notes for a realistic enterprise AI scenario.
02
Company targeting
Pick 2–3 employers; study their loops (Palantir decomp, lab applied rounds) and travel/clearance realities.
03
Network with signal
Talk to practicing FDEs; ask about KPI model and Day-2 ownership — not just TC screenshots.
Structure and many resource pointers are adapted from pierpaolo28/Awesome-FDE-Roadmap under the MIT License. Rewritten for multi-cloud neutrality and linked into fdehub.dev guides. © Pier Paolo Ippolito / contributors.