2 posts tagged with "engineering"

TL;DR: Embed with your own company instead of a customer. Replace bloated SaaS with custom tools, get paid a commission on what you save, and skip the salary band entirely.

The forward deployed engineer has become a fixture of modern enterprise sales. You take a sharp engineer, embed them with a prospective customer, let them absorb the workflows and pain points, and have them build a custom solution that closes the deal. Companies like Palantir built empires on this model, and now everyone from AI labs to infrastructure startups is copying the playbook.

But there's a mirror image of this role that almost nobody is talking about - and it might be the single biggest untapped opportunity for ambitious engineers right now. Call it the backwards deployed engineer. Same idea, but pointed inward: instead of embedding with customers to drive revenue, you embed with your own company's departments to eliminate cost. Specifically, the millions of dollars hemorrhaging out the door every year to bloated SaaS contracts.

For the past two decades, if you wanted to build a technology company, you needed engineers. Great ones. Lots of them. Expensive ones.

Engineering was the moat. It was the reason Google could do what Google does. The reason startups raised millions before shipping a single line of code. The reason "we need to hire more engineers" was the answer to almost every problem.

That era is ending.