# Forward Deployed Engineer review: research methods

Automation Switch | Evidence retrieved 6 October 2026

This document accompanies *What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer? A Review of 19 Employer Descriptions* and its reviewed-role CSV. It explains the evidence behind the comparison and the limits of its interpretation.

## Sources and sample

The review contains **22 employer role descriptions: 19 FDE-family descriptions from 19 employers and three adjacent-role descriptions from three other employers**. Sources are public English-language employer career pages and employer-controlled applicant tracking pages. Each retained record was checked against the full available role description.

The FDE family includes Forward Deployed Engineer and Forward Deployed Software Engineer, with seniority, location or domain qualifiers. Adjacent records retain their advertised titles: Solutions Engineer, Customer Engineer and Implementation Engineer. They provide examples of related technical work and are excluded from the 19-record FDE denominator.

This is a purposive sample selected to examine responsibilities and differences, not a random sample or an exhaustive directory. One description represents each employer in this edition. Mirrored pages and location variants were not counted as additional observations. Of 25 selected role URLs, 22 provided descriptions suitable for review; three were excluded because full text could not be retrieved. These counts describe selected role URLs, not all search results.

Provider marketing, practitioner accounts and explanatory articles supply separately attributed context in the article. They are not employer-role observations and are excluded from the sample counts.

## Reading the evidence table

The CSV preserves the employer, advertised title, location, source links and retrieval date for each record. Responsibilities and experience are concise summaries of the source, not verified accounts of daily work.

| Field | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| `id`, `employer`, `title`, `cohort` | Record identifier, employer, advertised title and FDE-family or adjacent cohort. |
| `source_url`, `resolved_url`, `location`, `retrieved_date` | Original and final source address, advertised location and date the evidence was retrieved. |
| `locus`, `work_scope` | The users or operating setting and the advertised technical work. |
| `production_operation` | Explicit operation, maintenance, monitoring, ongoing support or incident responsibility. Delivery alone is insufficient. Relevant maintenance experience requirements are identified in the interpretation note where used. |
| `reuse_or_product_feedback` | Explicit reusable tools or patterns, documentation, platform capability or product feedback. These differ in depth; presence does not establish that product code was shipped. |
| `commercial_responsibility` | Explicit evaluation, technical sales, deal support, closing, expansion or related commercial duties. A commercial customer segment alone is insufficient. |
| `experience` | Requested experience or graduate-entry wording, without imposing a common seniority scale. |
| `supporting_phrase`, `interpretation_note` | A short source phrase or heading and a clarification needed to interpret the record. |
| `vacancy_status` | Whether availability was independently confirmed. It was not independently confirmed for these records. |

**Present** means the retrieved description supports the responsibility. **Not stated** means it does not establish that responsibility, not that the job excludes it. An explicit exclusion would require a clear statement in the description; none was assigned in the three responsibility columns in this edition.

## Limitations

Sources were reviewed through one AI-assisted research process without independent second coding. Classification error remains possible, and inter-rater reliability was not measured.

The selection is concentrated in US roles and technology employers and includes several healthcare descriptions. Industries, seniority and operating conditions differ. The comparisons cannot establish labour-market prevalence, hiring demand, a universal role boundary or a standard qualification. Requested duties, workload allocations and employer targets are not observations of working time or achieved outcomes.

Retrieval date is not posting date. A readable description does not confirm an open vacancy, and source pages can change or disappear. The dataset describes the retrieved evidence, not a live jobs feed. No salary comparison, operational experiment or causal revenue finding is presented. The deployment loop and worksheet are illustrative decision aids, not validated assessment instruments.