Forward deployed engineer
Shipping into someone else’s production environment, then staying long enough to be accountable for it.
A forward deployed engineer works inside the customer’s environment rather than at arm’s length from it — learning their constraints, shipping against their deadlines, and carrying the consequences when something breaks at 2am. I have done that for fourteen years across enterprise commerce platforms, most recently leading production support for a B2B storefront that cannot go down.
Why the role suits me
Almost all of my work has been embedded. Kohler, Boeing Distribution, Etisalat, Verizon and Rogers were not projects I handed over at the end of a statement of work — they were environments I worked inside, alongside the client’s own engineers, usually for years rather than months.
That is a different job from consulting. You inherit decisions you did not make, you cannot rewrite your way out of them, and you are measured on whether the thing works on Monday rather than on the elegance of the proposal.
What I bring that is uncommon
I have been on both ends of the same decision. I spent years as an architect designing commerce platforms, and I currently lead the L2 support team that gets paged when a platform like that misbehaves. Architects who have never carried a pager design differently — and worse.
The clearest example: I wrote features for boeingdistribution.com in 2013, when it was KLX Aerospace. Ten years later I lead production support for the same platform. Very few people get to watch their own architectural decisions age for a decade.
Where this applies beyond commerce
The transferable skill is not Oracle ATG. It is operating inside a production system you did not build, under constraints you did not choose, with a customer watching. That maps directly onto AI and agent deployments, which fail for the same reasons enterprise integrations always have: unclear boundaries, no observability, and nobody accountable after handover.