FDE Field Engineer
Train the full Forward Deployed Engineer loop: turn ambiguous customer problems into production Claude systems — MCP integrations, cost-aware agents, eval gates, reliability, and portfolio-grade judgment.
Unit 1
The FDE Mandate
What Forward Deployed Engineers actually do: embed with customers, convert ambiguity into working systems, and feed product.
Essential question: How does an FDE create value when the customer cannot yet specify the product?
What FDEs Actually Do
55 min · 3 quiz items · 0 labs
Define the FDE role relative to pure SWE, solutions eng, and research
Ambiguity → Scope
60 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Convert a vague executive ask into a time-boxed pilot with non-goals
Stakeholders, Trust, and the Room
50 min · 2 quiz items · 0 labs
Map stakeholders who can kill, stall, or sponsor a pilot
Unit 2
Claude Platform Fluency
Production patterns: prompts as systems, tools & structured outputs, cost/context, safety rails that survive incentives.
Essential question: How do you design model-using systems that stay correct, cheap, and governable under load?
Prompts as Systems
55 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Factor prompts into policy, task, context, and tool contracts
Tools & Structured Outputs
55 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Design tool surfaces with explicit side effects and schemas
Context, Cost, and Caching
50 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Estimate cost drivers: tokens, tool loops, model tier
Safety Rails That Survive Contact
55 min · 2 quiz items · 2 labs
Design fail-closed auth, refuse lines, and human escalation paths
Unit 3
MCP & Integration Surfaces
Model Context Protocol as the field integration layer: resources, tools, transports, auth, multi-tenant judgment.
Essential question: How do you expose just enough of a customer system to the model — safely, testably, and portably?
Why MCP Exists
50 min · 2 quiz items · 0 labs
Explain MCP’s job: portable tool/resource interface across hosts
Tools, Resources, Auth
60 min · 3 quiz items · 1 labs
Design a minimal MCP surface with clear read/write separation
Integration Studio
65 min · 1 quiz items · 1 labs
Ship a complete integration design packet for peer review
Unit 4
Agents & Orchestration
Pipelines over single calls: sub-agents, escalation gates, tool loops, and when not to agent-ify.
Essential question: When should intelligence be a pipeline with gates rather than one chat completion?
When to Agent-ify (and When Not)
50 min · 2 quiz items · 0 labs
Decide single-call vs multi-step agent architectures
Escalation Gates & Sub-agents
60 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Design model-independent gates for cheap→expensive cascades
Orchestration Drill
55 min · 1 quiz items · 1 labs
Deliver an orchestration policy memo a customer eng lead would accept
Unit 5
Evals, Reliability & Ship
Golden sets, CI gates, observability, multi-tenant deploy judgment, and the FDE portfolio capstone.
Essential question: What evidence justifies shipping — and what evidence demands a rollback?
Evals That Gate Ship
60 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Build an eval harness with golden cases, slices, and CI-ready gates
Failure Modes & Observability
55 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Catalog failure modes with detection and fallback
Deploy Judgment & Multi-tenancy
55 min · 2 quiz items · 1 labs
Reason about serverless multi-tenant deploys, secrets, and blast radius
Capstone: FDE Portfolio Engagement
90 min · 2 quiz items · 2 labs
Assemble a complete FDE engagement package for a simulated or real customer