Forward Deployed Engineering at Cursor — Pauline Brunet

Pauline Brunet, VP of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) at Cursor, an AI coding platform, shares insights into building and running an effective FDE function. She emphasizes that FDE is a rapidly growing and critical role in the current technological landscape, especially with the accelerated adoption of AI.

Defining Forward Deployed Engineering

Brunet clarifies that FDE is distinct from traditional professional services or staff augmentation. She maps the FDE role onto a matrix with “Customer Digital Maturity” on one axis and “Product Customization” on the other:

• High Maturity, Low Customization (e.g., SaaS out-of-the-box): FDE is generally not needed; self-service and good documentation suffice.
• Low Maturity, Low Customization (e.g., traditional SaaS deployment): Not an ideal fit for FDE; focus should be on traditional deployment models.
• High Maturity, High Customization: FDE acts as an advisor, accelerating customer adoption and enabling them to build on the platform.
• Low Maturity, High Customization: FDE provides embedded transformation, offering significant hands-on support for customers earlier in their digital journey who may lack internal resources.

Brunet highlights that the core FDE value lies in the higher customization quadrants, where FDEs can extend applications, create new features, and provide valuable feedback loops to product and engineering teams. Crucially, FDEs should avoid basic product training or bug-fixing, focusing instead on driving business value.

The “Magical Unicorn” FDE Profile

An effective FDE is characterized as a “magical unicorn” possessing:

• High Technical Acumen and IQ: Deep technical expertise is paramount.
• Customer-Facing Skills: Ability to engage with all levels of an organization (CIOs to developers) to lead discovery, identify use cases, and understand customer processes and culture.
• Change Agent: Actively accompanies customers through digital transformation, ensuring technology adoption by addressing human elements.
• Cutting-Edge Knowledge: Stays current with rapid technological advancements (e.g., weekly AI releases).
• Feedback Loop Facilitator: Acts as a crucial bridge between customers and internal product/engineering teams, providing insights for future development.

Cursor’s FDE Approach and Mission

Cursor’s FDE team focuses on clients with mature, deeply technical buyers and users. Their approach involves:

• Project-Based, High Impact: Engagements are strategic, tied to economic buyers, and designed to drive measurable ROI.
• Pushing Edge Cases: FDEs are the “tip of the spear” for exploring novel use cases beyond the traditional software development lifecycle (e.g., HR, finance, supply chain applications for AI).
• Co-development: Works directly within customer codebases, collaborating closely with their teams. A key red flag is requests for staff augmentation; FDE should be about co-creation, not filling resource gaps.
• Influencing Product Roadmap: Directly shapes Cursor’s product development based on customer needs and emerging use cases.

Cursor’s FDE Mission: “We partner with your organization to co-design and co-build your AI software factory. We transform how you design, develop, and maintain software across your entire life cycle.” Brunet advises all FDE teams to define a clear mission to guide their work and prevent scope creep.

Team Structure and Evolution

Cursor initially hires “unicorns” – highly experienced (5+ years as software engineers) and customer-facing individuals. As the team scales, roles will likely specialize, separating purely technical roles from more customer-centric ones. The team operates in a matrix organization, currently geography-based but with plans to evolve to industry-specific alignment to leverage specialized domain knowledge (e.g., finance, healthcare). They also foster SMEs for specific product areas (e.g., cloud agents, SDK).

Best Practices for FDE

Brunet shares practical advice for FDE success, drawn from her 10 years of experience:

• Learn Quickly and Pivot: Don’t overplan; experiment and learn from failures.
• Listen to Customers: Adapt offerings based on recurring needs, even if they’re outside initial plans (e.g., organizational change for AI adoption).
• Partner with System Integrators (SIs) and Consultants: Leverage their deep customer knowledge and relationships, and offload tasks like change management.
• Don’t Be Afraid to Say No: Builds credibility and ensures FDE focuses on suitable use cases where Cursor’s platform truly excels.
• Attract and Pay the Right Talent: Crucial for maintaining a high-performing team and ensuring they stay motivated.

Tips for Running FDE Projects

• Solve the Right Problem: Deeply inquire and identify the root cause, often by engaging directly with process owners.
• Define Success from the Start: Establish clear, measurable success criteria and KPIs (e.g., reducing process time from 3 hours to 20 minutes).
• Keep Scope Directional: Acknowledge unknowns and allow for iterative learning and pivoting. Avoid rigid, long-term engagements without clear, phased objectives.
• Involve the Customer at Every Step: Customers must be active participants in design, building, validation, and ROI identification. FDEs should never work in isolation.
• Measure Success and ROI: Quantify the business impact, focusing on increasing revenue, decreasing costs, or mitigating risks, and over-communicate these achievements.
• Leave Documentation Artifacts: Ensure customers have the necessary resources for long-term self-sufficiency.

Brunet concludes by emphasizing the importance of building the right FDE motion for a specific company, fostering a culture of continuous learning and high performance, and making strategic hiring decisions to attract and retain “A players.”

• Tags:
• Feature
• Enterprise AI
• AI Strategy
• Cursor
• FDE
• Team Building
• Product-Led Growth
• AI Deployment
• Forward Deployed Engineering
• Customer Success
• Technical Consulting