Forward-Deployed Engineer Resume
Skills & ATS Keywords

Aim for 30 to 42 specific languages, data and integration tools, IaC platforms, cloud vendors, and compliance frameworks grouped into 6 or 7 labeled rows. Under 22 reads thin for any FDE role above Mid; over 50 reads like a feature dump. Every line in the Skills row should resurface inside at least one shipped customer deployment, POC, or data pipeline bullet.

Python, TypeScript, SQL, REST and gRPC, Airflow or dbt, Terraform, Kubernetes and Helm, AWS or Azure or GCP, OAuth and SAML and OIDC, SOC 2 and FedRAMP, on-call and runbooks, and customer deployment or POC are the non-negotiables. Air-gapped or on-prem deployment, HIPAA, customer ARR retention, and a workshop or readout publish separate Senior and Staff files.

Forward-Deployed Engineer (this page) ships production code at a customer site: data pipelines, API integration, IaC, the POC that turned into a paid deployment. Sales Engineer is pre-sales, demos and discovery and PoC scripting, less new production code. Solutions Architect draws the reference architecture and the migration plan, fewer hours inside the customer codebase. Customer Success Engineer and Post-Sales Engineer pick up after the contract closes, focused on adoption, support, and renewal rather than new code at deployment. If your week is a Terraform module on Monday, a customer data pipeline on Wednesday, and a security review packet on Friday, you are on the right page.

Not for every seat, but a clear half of the 2026 FDE market sits inside FedRAMP, SOC 2, HIPAA, or defense boundaries. Palantir, Anduril, Scale, and the deployment-engineer track at frontier-model labs all weight cleared or clearable candidates. If you have written a security review packet, owned a SOC 2 Type II evidence cycle, or shipped into a FedRAMP Moderate boundary, name it on the file. If you have not, lead with the compliance work you have done (HIPAA BAA, GDPR data residency) and signal you can clear.

Quote the customer tier (Fortune 100, federal agency, regional health system), the POC-to-production conversion (3 of 4 POCs into paid deployments), the deployment cycle (12-week target, shipped in 9), the data scale (47 source systems, 2.3 TB per day pipeline), and the contract outcome (ARR retained, expansion signed, security review cleared in one cycle). A line like "Owned the Palantir Foundry deployment at a top-3 US health system, integrated 47 source systems via Airflow and dbt, cleared SOC 2 boundary review in one cycle, drove POC-to-production conversion in 9 weeks against a 12-week target" reads at the Senior band.

Production code wins by a wide margin in 2026. FDE files that lean on workshop counts, executive readouts, and slide-deck volume read as Solutions Architect or Sales Engineer adjacent. The pipeline wants the Python or TypeScript module that landed in the customer repo, the Terraform plan that provisioned the deployment, the dbt model that closed a data quality gap, the on-call rotation you covered for the customer-facing stack. Pair workshops and readouts with the artifact they produced (a runbook, a migration plan, a customer-owned dashboard). Run the file through an ATS Checker to confirm the parse.

At Senior and Staff bands, yes. The proof is the dollar figure attached to the deployment: a 7-figure ARR account you stabilized in one quarter, a 30 percent expansion the deployment unlocked, a churn save tied to a runbook you wrote. Quote the account tier (top-3 customer, anchor logo), the deployment scope (47 source systems, 3 regions, 12-week cycle), the contract outcome (ARR retained, expansion booked, renewal signed), and the on-call signal (zero customer-impacting incidents in 2 quarters). "Stabilized the 4.2M ARR anchor account through a Helm-on-EKS deployment refactor, drove 1.1M expansion in 2 quarters" beats "supported customer deployments" copy.