By Simon Gonzalez de Cruz (follow the build in public on X @KyaniteLabs_). 2026-08-24. Written for people comparing offers or postings at 1am.
These four titles describe mostly the same job: an engineer who sits close to the customer and makes the product work inside the customer's reality. What actually differs is the coding bar, where you sit in the sales funnel, and who owns the outcome after launch. At many companies the titles are interchangeable. At a few, they are different careers. This post gives you the decoder: what each title signals, what does not change, and the three questions that reveal what a posting really wants.
A note on stakes: the AI labs are hiring forward deployed engineers aggressively right now, and enterprises are starting to demand the same shape for AI that touches banks, insurers, and airlines. Title inflation is guaranteed. The decoder matters more than the name.
The one-paragraph version of each title
Forward deployed engineer (FDE): the engineer embedded with the customer's hardest real problem. Ships production code into the customer's environment, builds the evals that prove it works, and stays until it runs unattended. Highest coding bar of the four. The title comes out of Palantir and is now standard at the AI labs.
Solutions engineer: the technical half of a sales motion. Runs demos, answers deep technical questions, builds proof-of-concepts, and unblocks evaluations. Coding happens, but the deliverable is the deal. You sit before the sale.
Implementation engineer: the engineer who executes a defined rollout. The scope exists, the contract is signed, your job is configuration, integration, data migration, and go-live. Deep in the last mile, narrower in scope than an FDE, and usually no sales pressure.
Customer engineer: the post-sale technical counterpart. Health checks, escalations, enablement, and a lot of "why is it slow this week." Closest to support of the four, with real engineering when escalations go deep. Google and several infrastructure companies use this name.
The table
| Forward deployed | Solutions | Implementation | Customer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where you sit | Inside the hardest problem | Before the sale | After the sale, during rollout | After go-live |
| Coding bar | Highest, production code | Medium, demos and POCs | Medium, configs and integrations | Medium, escalations |
| Typical deliverable | Working system plus evals | Closed deal | Go-live | Retained account |
| Evals in the job? | Core skill | Unblocks the buyer's eval | Sometimes | Rarely |
| Pager? | Often yes | No | Go-live windows | Escalation rotation |
| You will like it if you want... | Hard, messy, real problems | Variety and velocity | Finish lines | Long relationships |
What does not change across all four
You translate between two languages: the customer's workflow and the product's machinery. That skill is identical in every variant. So is the need to write plainly for people who are not engineers. If you have that translation muscle from any deploy-it-in-the-real-world job, you can move between these titles. I spent twelve years doing this shape of work in enterprise learning systems, Workday, SuccessFactors, Cornerstone, for organizations of 8,000+ people. The title on my badge was never any of these four. The work was.
The three questions that decode any posting
Question one: who writes code, me or the product team? If the answer is "you, in the customer's repo," it is an FDE job whatever the title says. If it is "you configure what exists," it is implementation.
Question two: who owns the number? After launch, someone is accountable for the system actually working. If it is you, you are forward deployed. If it is sales, you are solutions. If it is support, you are customer engineering.
Question three: where is the pager? Follow the on-call rotation. It tells you the truth about the role faster than any job description.
How to prove you can do it, whatever the title
Every variant of this job interview asks the same thing in different words: show me you made something real work somewhere hostile. The strongest artifact you can carry is an eval with your name on it. Mine is public: delegation-bench, 495 trials, certified floors, walk-away certification, sabotage cell. It has opened more doors than any title on my resume. Start here: what a forward deployed engineer actually does, and how I became one without a software title.
Part of the FDE series. Need this kind of work in your environment? Implementation intake. Conditions and raw logs for every number cited: github.com/KyaniteLabs/delegation-bench.