Making FDE skills clear, comparable and trusted.

The role

What FDE work is

A forward deployed engineer embeds with a customer, internal or external, to take a technical capability, now usually AI-based, from an unclear problem to a production outcome the customer owns. The work spans discovery, design, building, deployment, adoption, handover, and feeding what was learned back into the product.

It’s different from pre-sales demonstration, account management and advisory-only consulting. FDEs are measured by production outcomes, not demos or hours.

What we’re doing

1. Publishing an open competency framework (v0.1 draft now).
2. Running a practitioner survey (State of FDE 2026) to inform it.
3. Validating it through a formal job task analysis with practitioners and subject-matter experts.
4. Working toward a credential that is kept separate from any training.

How we stay independent

• We don’t sell training, and we won’t require any specific course.
• Membership and sponsorship never buy influence over framework content or any future assessment.
• Training providers can say their material is “aligned to the open framework”. They can’t call it official, approved or accredited.
• Advisors declare conflicts of interest.

Why mortgage and fintech first

Lending is document-heavy, standards-driven and tightly regulated, so it’s a demanding test of what good deployment work requires. It’s our first specialty track, not our boundary. Other tracks can follow the same structure.

Who’s behind it

FDE Council was founded by Noor Surani and is being shaped by its founding community and a forming advisory board.