🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝

A weekly newsletter for 38,000+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who grabbed the popcorn and watched the billionaires fight it out on X.

🥳 Happy Friday! Three founders messaged David and Asher this week wanting Forward Deployed Engineers. A year ago, most people had never heard the term. Now FDE postings are doubling weekly, with no signs of slowing down.

Here's why this matters: Palantir proved engineers can own customer relationships. OpenAI's FDE team is closing eight-figure deals. Startups with FDEs close enterprise deals 3x faster. The supply-demand gap is massive, particularly for recent grads/early career engineers looking to break into startups.

Your first three years usually mean grinding tickets and hoping for mentorship. As an FDE, you're embedded with the clients, designing solutions, and shipping to production.

I see this as a massive opportunity at a time where AI is threatening the very existence of junior engineering roles. Startups that would normally require 5+ years of experience are hiring recent grads as FDEs. Why? Because the skill set is so rare that potential matters more than pedigree.

Know any sharp 0-3 year engineers who can code AND handle customers

We’d love to meet them!

Your referral gets hired = you get up to $2,000

⭐️ Just reply to this email and make sure to CC your referral. ⭐️

📖 What We’re Reading: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? When it comes to writing about trends in the engineering world, no one does it better than Gergely Orosz. In his latest post, he unpacks the rise and significance of FDEs, while making intricate organizational dynamics and career trajectories feel tangible and relevant. I’m smarter every time I read him, so enjoy!

🎧 What We’re Listening To: How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory. Host Lenny Rachitsky sits down with Nabeel S. Qureshi, a founder, writer, and former forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, to break down the unique engineering culture that has made Palantir a “founder factory.” Nabeel shares firsthand insights into Palantir’s unconventional hiring, its focus on independent-minded and competitive engineers, and the forward-deployed engineer model that puts technical talent directly in the field with customers. 

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI

💸 Round/Funding: Seed

🏦 Investors: YC, Google's Gradient Ventures, Daybreak Ventures

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building self-improving consumer software that autonomously generates, tests, and optimizes app experiences - driving revenue, conversion, and retention without manual intervention. The goal: a future where consumer apps manage themselves, continuously evolving to outperform the competition while founders sleep.

🏗️ Product: This Startup automates the entire feature lifecycle, from idea to live deployment - using advanced AI.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Founding Full Stack Engineer; Full Stack (Front End emphasis); Full Stack (Back End emphasis)

💸 Salary: $150k-250k 

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 6

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI, Cybersecurity

💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $20M

🏦 Investors: Ballistic Ventures, Charles River, Goldcrest Capital (first investors in SpaceX), Mantis Ventures, Shrug Ventures, Slow Ventures

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Thoughtful Cyber Agents for Identity. This Startup is protecting the digital presence of the world’s largest brands, businesses and IP.

🏗️ Product: AI agents secure modern attach surfaces with advanced search, real-time threat classification, and automated response.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Front End; Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Senior Front End

💸 Salary: $170k - $210K

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI, Legal

💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $60M

🏦 Investors: Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, a16z

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is the leader in AI for Plaintiff Law, helping them take on more cases and increase revenue

🏗️ Product: This Startup is legal AI for plaintiff litigation firms. She handles the heavy lifting of a case - from intake through resolution. Built on top of a case intelligence engine, This Startup ingests all case information from legal business and communication systems and uses it to perform a wide variety of legal work including document analysis and legal document drafting.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Staff Software Engineer; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

💸 Salary: $200k - $300k

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 3

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI-powered productivity platform for construction. By outfitting workers with body-worn cameras and combining human labeling with AI vision models, This Startup helps job site leaders manage performance, cut costs, and unlock real productivity—treating labor like a coached sport, not a black box. The goal? Real-time visibility, faster decisions, and safer, smarter sites.

🏗️ Product: This Startup combines AI wearables, custom labeling infrastructure, and a real-time analytics dashboard to capture and interpret field-level construction data. Workers wear cameras embedded into hard hats or bodycams. The footage is streamed via Starlink, labeled using This Startup’s internal platform, and processed with computer vision models to:

The system offers COOs a kind of “fantasy football dashboard” for their workforce—finally bringing measurable metrics to a $12T global construction industry still running on PDFs and guesswork.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Platform Engineer; Staff AI/ML

💸 Salary: $180K - $225K+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI Models

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: To reinvent robotic process automation (RPA) with intelligent agents, making enterprise workflows faster, more adaptive, and vastly more accessible across legacy industries.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is building the next-gen RPA platform—AI-native and no-code.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Back End; FDE (Forward Deployed); Senior Full Stack

💸 Salary: $120k - $250k

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI, Fintech, SaaS

💸 Round/Funding: Series A

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Deliver magical financial moments to everyone—investors, advisors, and clients alike.

This Startup is becoming the client experience layer of financial services—like Spotify or Uber, but for finance. Seamless, smart, and built around the end user.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is a vertical SaaS platform powering investment proposals and onboarding for financial advisors.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Back End; AI / LLM Engineer

💸 Salary: $230K

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS

💸 Round/Funding: Seed

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI platform for internal IT and security teams—eliminating the help desk and letting people focus on work that actually matters.

Vision is to reinvent IT ops by making it easier to automate a task forever than to do it manually once. This Startup aims to replace legacy incumbents with a smarter, AI-native platform purpose-built for modern tech companies.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is an AI-native internal automation platform that helps IT and security teams eliminate manual workflows.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE); Back End; Senior Product Engineer

💸 Salary: $160k - 280k+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: Remote

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup’s mission is to make it radically easier to build housing in U.S. cities. By merging deep infill expertise with a generative AI platform, they empower developers to bring high-quality, code-compliant homes to market faster, cheaper, and more predictably.

Their long-term vision is to streamline the preconstruction stack—feasibility, design, permitting—so cities can unlock desperately needed housing at scale.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is a full-service architecture firm + generative AI platform that helps developers quickly answer: “What can I build on this lot?”

Core functionality:

This radically accelerates urban housing development—especially where traditional architecture can’t move fast or affordably enough.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Full Stack Engineer

💸 Salary: $140k - 200k+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: NONE