Forward Deployed Engineer skills

• Systems design

  Design a service in a room. Explain tradeoffs to a VP. Ship it in a week.
• SQL and data wrangling

  Join messy warehouse tables on day one. Notebooks, pandas, DuckDB, dbt.
• Full-stack prototyping

  Ship a working UI against real data in a day. React, FastAPI, Next, or whatever the client runs.
• Platform fluency

  Know your product cold. FDEs at OpenAI live in the API. FDEs at Palantir live in Foundry.
• Debugging in prod

  Read stack traces on a customer's laptop over Zoom without panic.
• Agent orchestration

  Drive a coding agent through discovery, build, and debrief without losing context.

• Discovery

  Ask the question the brief avoided. Sit in the awkward silence.
• Executive communication

  Brief a VP in three sentences. Write a decision memo a lawyer could read.
• Scope discipline

  Cut everything that does not prove the loop. Say no politely and often.
• Client posture

  Own the room. Be the calmest person when the demo breaks.
• Domain absorption

  Learn insurance, defense, or biotech vocabulary in a week.
• Memory discipline

  Write down what was decided and why. Every session. No exceptions.

The best FDEs win on one thing: they show up Monday knowing exactly where Friday ended. Notes are structured. Decisions are logged with reasoning. Risks are tracked out loud. Their coding agent is bound to the same discipline, not asked to guess.

That is the whole thesis behind FDEOps: one @fde skill, one folder per engagement, a private fieldbook the agent writes into after every session. Skills without memory decay. Memory without method is a diary.