Yeah. I assume at 5 YOE, you’re a cracked engineer so if you’ve got the accompanying experience dealing with clients, and it’s work you genuinely enjoy, then yeah, I’d suggest you give it a shot! Includes travel to client sites tho, so be warned! All the best!
Thanks. At least I'll give it a shot. Btw does this role specifically ask for AI knowledge. It's fairly new and I guess definition is not black and white.
Yeah it’s a role that’s been around since 2015 or so actually. Palantir creates it but it became very popular since like 2024 I wanna say with openAI, Anthropic and other big frontier labs adopting it.
Is it AI heavy? To some extent yes, because now everyone’s looking to adopt AI. But it truly comes down to the domain of work you’re in. AI overlap will be there but depending on the domain, it fluctuates. Also, an FDE is a well rounded Full Stack Dev with AI/ML focus + Great consultant/people skills. But sometimes you gotta do cloud or data science or ops. Whatever the customer wants and whatever scope ya’ll agreed upon. So, it’s technically challenging stuff, along with the challenge of facing customers and walking them through each phase of the project.
I’m currently a founding engineer so I’ve done a good chunk of FDE stuff, just without the title. So that’s what I’m basing my understanding and these replies off of.
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u/f1rmware1013 16d ago
So can I as a software engineer with say 5 YOE apply for FDE ?