Forward deployed engineering overview
Contents
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is PostHog's team of engineers who work with our biggest customers on short-term projects to deliver measurable, delightful outcomes. Depending on the engagement, that might mean hands-on engineering in their codebase (migrations, instrumentation, custom workflows, dashboards, experiments), or it might mean setting up the right foundations and enabling their team to follow PostHog best practices without ever touching code.
We work across the whole customer lifecycle, from new business and migrations with TAEs, to expansion with TAMs, to retention with CSMs. We then feed what we learn back into the product to benefit the wider PostHog user base.
We bias for action and hyper-focus on solving the customer's most important problem first, delivering the best measurable outcome. Compounding isn't the goal, but it's a natural by-product of excellent work: the patterns we see across engagements become reusable artifacts, skills, and product improvements, so the next customer starts further ahead.
FDE isn't just technical execution. AI has made people faster at building things, so the value we add is judgment, taste, and reasoning: prioritizing what matters most for the customer, helping them find the root of their problem, then planning and building production-ready solutions inside the customer's environment.
We sit between the customer, sales and CS, and product engineering. See how we work for how we operate day to day.
What makes a good FDE
FDEs need to navigate and operate autonomously within a customer's environment. We hire people who embody PostHog's values, but on top of that, the following characteristics make a good FDE:
- Bias for action and ownership. We make the customer's pain and problems our own. That takes agency and urgency, and it means we're accountable for the outcome.
- Technical depth. We need to own the entire stack end to end, from instrumentation and data pipelines to production code in their environment. That's what earns credibility with the customer's engineers.
- Ability to navigate ambiguity. The problem space is often unclear, so we look for friction signals, then frame and scope the work before we design and build.
- Tying work to measurable value. We connect every technical deliverable to a measurable outcome for the customer.
What an FDE does
We don't maintain a fixed list of services; however we do track all our previous engagements so as not to reinvent the wheel. If a customer has a real problem where hands-on engineering can make a difference, we're interested in seeing if we can help. In practice, we often:
- Help customers design and implement PostHog for their specific stack, scale, and use cases
- Unblock technical adoption: instrumentation, data modeling, migrations, and integrations
- Build reference implementations, examples, and internal tooling that make future engagements faster
- Feed real customer learnings and problems back into the product via our product engineering teams
You can also check out our FDE Menu of Services, which covers the services FDE offers (though it's by no means an exhaustive list), how we've priced past engagements, and case studies from real customers.
What an FDE isn't
- Support. We have an amazing Support team who provide deep technical insight and fix issues day to day, but they have to move fast from customer to customer. FDE work is higher-touch, tied to a specific customer outcome, and often involves hands-on engineering.
- Sales, success, or account management. The customer's TAE, TAM, or CSM owns the commercial relationship; we're embedded on the technical side for scoped engagements.
- Product engineering. Our focus is solving customer problems, not owning product direction. But we create leverage by turning what we learn in the field into product advantage, helping our product teams prioritize.
When FDE gets involved
The FDE team is small, so we're deliberate about where we spend time. Typical triggers:
- A high-value prospect or customer with a technical blocker to adoption or expansion
- A complex implementation, migration, or integration that benefits from hands-on engineering
- The same technical problem showing up across several customers at once
- An ambiguous, open-ended problem with no clear owner or obvious solution, where an engineer needs to dig in, work out what's really going on, and define the path forward
Who to talk to
If you have a customer who might need FDE help, or you're trying to figure out whether something fits, the fastest path is to talk to the
