The FDE Playbook: Exactly How Cursor is Building Its Team
The job title is everywhere. The definition is not.
Forward deployed engineering has become one of the most searched, most debated functions in enterprise software, and also one of the least understood. Palantir famously built an early version of it more than a decade ago. But until recently, FDE lived mostly in the background of how technical software got sold and deployed, with little fanfare.
So why is it now one of the hottest jobs in tech?
According to Pauline Brunet, VP of Forward Deployed Engineering for Cursor, it's the surface area: “Forward Deployed Engineering sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and the customer.”
"The configurability of modern AI products has made the gap between what software can do and what customers can figure out on their own much wider. FDE lives in that gap."
Before joining Cursor to lead the FDE team, Brunet also built FDE teams at Element AI (acquired by ServiceNow) and C3 AI, which makes her someone who has seen this function across multiple companies, multiple product categories, and multiple iterations of what "forward deployed" actually means in practice.
We hosted Brunet at a Notable event in San Francisco recently, where she generously opened up her playbook on how Cursor defines FDE, what she looks for in this unicorn hire, and her winning formula for structuring FDE engagements with Cursor customers.
What FDE is (and what it's not)
Brunet kicked us off with a sentiment that just about everyone in the FDE space is feeling: "FDE has this magical unicorn title that means everything and nothing at the same time.”
At Cursor, her team sits between the engineering and product org and the go-to-market team, but the placement matters less than the spirit of the work. "What matters is that you are solving customer challenges. Not just fixing bugs, not just reporting feature requests, not strictly working on the base product for everyone. You are specifically working with and for a customer."
“FDE is the last mile where platform vision becomes production reality. It’s where what a product can do meets what a specific customer actually needs to accomplish.”
Here’s what that looks like in practice: Take a use case of setting up cloud agents to transform the entire software development life cycle for a large telecom. Brunet’s team maps the full workflow: what the customer is trying to automate, where those automations need to pull data from, how a Cursor agent can fit into the process and actually move the needle. The output could be a new internal tool, an automated triage workflow, a co-built product on top of the SDK. Then, they send a Cursor FDE onsite to make it happen. The starting point is always the business problem, not the technology.
That customer orientation is also what separates FDE from traditional professional services or solutions engineering, a distinction Brunet thinks about carefully. Imagine deploying Salesforce: "You have a requirements doc, 17 configuration steps, and you repeat the same process across customers with minimal variation."
FDE is different because the product is new, highly configurable, and still changing fast. "The SDK has basically no ceiling. So the FDE has to understand customer problems and imagine use cases on behalf of the customer, not just execute a known playbook. They're working at the bleeding edge."
This also extends to the type of customer engagement Cursor FDE will take on. Every project her team runs is tied to a defined business objective with a real return: increase revenue, decrease costs, or reduce risks for an organization.
“Pick use cases that are strategic objectives for your customer, that drive meaningful return for the customer, are technically feasible, for which your platform is particularly good at solving, and that are worth the customer investing time and resources to solve with you,” she says.
The unicorn problem: who she’s actually hiring
If you've tried to hire for an FDE role recently, you already know the next part.
"Right now I'm looking for unicorns," Brunet said. "And I know I won't be able to fill a team of 100, 200, 300 with what I'm looking for today."
The profile she's after includes 5+ years of software engineering experience, strong system design instincts, customer-facing experience, and the ability to communicate fluently across an entire customer org.
On the technical side, Brunet screens less for the ability to write clean code on command and more for the ability to think across systems. "Can you understand a customer challenge and map the systems and tools involved? Where will the agent get its information? How does data flow?"
On the communication side, the range required is what makes this hire such a rare bird. "Can you talk to a CTO about what they care about? Can you step into the shoes of a subject matter expert in healthcare or manufacturing and understand their world?" Brunet brings members of her sales and pre-sales teams into the interview process specifically to probe for this, with a particular focus on empathy.
“In Silicon Valley, we sometimes forget how far ahead we are,” she says.
“You can't walk into a customer account without understanding that there are dynamics at play and reasons things are the way they are. You have to have empathy for where they are on the journey and help them move forward.
Her broader hiring philosophy shapes everything else. "A players hire A players, B players hire C players." It's why she's been deliberate about keeping the team lean while she's building it — she'd rather have a small group of people who are genuinely exceptional than scale fast and dilute the standard.
How the work actually runs
Brunet is emphatic about one thing: everything happens before the order form gets signed.
She won't start an engagement without first understanding the customer's problem in granular detail: the department, the function, the future state they're trying to reach. She asks customers to walk her through their exact systems before she scopes anything. She writes weekly objectives directly into the proposal, so both sides have a shared reference point from day one. And Cursor customers pay to have FDEs brought in, so that there’s significant skin in the game.
Once an engagement starts, the structure is sprint-based: kickoff, weekly syncs, clear deliverables at each stage. Engagements can range from a gap analysis over a few weeks to a full SDK build over several months. Her preference, regardless of scope, is short and high-intensity, with the customer's team owning everything by the end.
FDE: The closest thing to a real-time product sensor
For any company thinking about standing up or scaling an FDE function, remember: these teams don't just help customers adopt the product and increase ACV. "FDE has the best real-time view of what customers are actually using the product for, and crucially, what's missing. We're a natural feeder into the roadmap," Brunet says.
Built right, FDE is the part of the org with the clearest, most current picture of where the product needs to go next.
In a moment when AI products are changing faster than any customer can keep up with, the team that sits at the last mile is also the team that sees the next mile coming.
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