Rise of the FDE role
The forward deployed engineer is the most coveted and diluted role on the market right now. OpenAI and Anthropic have each spun up billion-dollar ventures built around it. Amazon just committed $1B to stand up its own FDE organisation. The CEO of Google Cloud is personally recruiting for the role on LinkedIn.
We believe this is a lagging indicator to the reality that there is a large gap between AI capability and AI implementation. FDEs are the solution to bridge that gap, embedding them with customers, writing production code, translating institutional knowledge into something a model can actually act on.
The FDE role is outdated
As we built Hyde, we thought hard about where the obvious gaps sit in the applied AI value chain and what skills we need to hire for. Two realisations jump out:
- the gap exists across the value chain, from research to productionization to customer delivery; and
- the traditional concept of 'skills' is quickly converging into a commodity
AI is already replacing highly technical skills, such as coding, product design and marketing -the very skills companies have historically hired and organized around. What AI can't yet replicate, is the judgment and taste to build systems that operate seamlessly and safely inside complex, high-stakes enterprise environments.
As we tried to map out these high-judgment roles, we realised that the line between the person who trains the model, the person who deploys it, and the person who sells it was already dissolving in practice - it just hadn't caught up on the org chart yet.
So we stopped drawing it, and built a single role instead: the AI Builder.
Introducing the AI Builder
AI Builders work across forward deployed engineering, research, product, and GTM, not as four separate lanes that occasionally cross, but as one muscle, exercised differently, each rep sharpening the others.
Applied AI is a 4-year old field that is constantly changing at pace. Frontier knowledge is itself experiential. Solving customer problems leads to better products. Advanced research insights drives sharper, more tailored solutions back to the customer. The only moat to stay on the frontier is to be fluid across customers, product and research.
After speaking to hundreds of candidates, one common thread emerges. Top talent in the current AI era want cross-functional exposure - they want to move dynamically across these roles and sharpen their toolkit against every part of the business.
Over time, every AI Builder naturally converges on the area they're most drawn to, and most spiky at - the place where their judgment runs deepest and sharpest. We let them land in that place themselves.
AI Builders are like triathletes: training across all three disciplines makes each one stronger. But every triathlete eventually finds the event they excel at, and that's where they go deepest.
What we value in our AI Builders
Exceptional engineering talent and problem-solving skills: No problem is too hard, or too fast, for AI Builders. We work on mission-critical systems for some of the world's most demanding organizations, where success requires the intellectual rigor of a research lab and the execution speed of a startup. We operate as an idea meritocracy: the best solution wins, regardless of where it comes from.
Radical ownership mindset: Our AI Builders are trusted with meaningful responsibility from day one. They thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous situations and move toward problems, instead of away from them. "Done" isn't a checklist - it's solving the whole problem to the highest standard
Communication and empathy: Our AI Builders have real empathy for external stakeholders, helping them navigate the genuinely hard problem of enterprise AI implementation. That same empathy runs inward too: we challenge each other to become better, support one another generously, and believe Hyde becomes stronger when every individual around us grows.
The industry is racing to hire people who can stand between cutting-edge AI and enterprise adoption. We're building the next evolution of AI Builders who don't just plug the gap, but close it.
Interested in becoming an early AI Builder at Hyde? See open roles here.
