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Forward Deployed Engineering at Cogent: Build the Machine That Scales the Business
Most companies treat forward deployed engineering as a sales function that scales with headcount. At Cogent, a small team of FDEs is building the agents and systems that make every future deployment faster, and eventually autonomous.
3 min read
Every AI company is hiring forward deployed engineers. But few are building the role to last.
Traditionally, the FDE role sits closer to sales than to engineering. FDEs are there primarily to help close deals, keeping the work transactional instead of building tooling that endures.
At Cogent, FDE is an engineering function first. Our team writes production code and owns customer deployments end to end, while also building the internal systems and automation that make every future deployment faster, and eventually autonomous. We're creating an FDE function that scales exponentially with our customer base while the team stays small.
What FDE at Cogent Looks Like
The System That Compounds on Itself
The conventional FDE playbook scales linearly: more customers, more engineers. Some companies hire 100 FDEs to support 1,000 enterprise customers. We're making a different bet. A team of 15, kept small on purpose, building the agents and products to support those same 1,000 customers.
Staying this lean means looking at every manual step in a deployment and asking whether anyone should ever have to do it again.
That work feeds what we call the AI FDE: our agentic platform that automates the deployment pipeline itself. Here's a look at some of what the team has already shipped:
End-to-end integrations of new customer data sources, with agents that understand and enrich the data as it comes in, all from a single prompt
Observability agents and dashboards that keep our sales teams current on every account
Product surfaces adapted to be configurable by any user
The right set of engineers building the right systems will always outperform a team ten times their size.
Solving Problems the Customer Can't Name Yet
FDEs at Cogent aren’t configuration engineers.
Customers often come to us knowing something is wrong in their security program, but they don't have a clear picture of the problem or how to fix it. Extending beyond consultation, our FDEs embed into each customer's environment to understand every pain and then build the right solution alongside their teams. Each fix becomes part of our product, so the next customer starts with it on day one.
FDEs ship alongside every area from product to our AI and data platform teams, picking up new tools and languages along the way. This range means your work shows up across the whole product, and you see how the entire company works.
The Founder's Training Ground
If you want to start a company someday, this is the closest thing to running one without taking the leap.
It’s a key skill for any founder to be able to empathize with customer pain points and then tastefully build what people actually want. Our FDEs do that every week, continuously refining this skillset with every deployment.
Take third-party API integrations. Customers kept asking us to connect the tools they already use, and FDE bandwidth was the bottleneck. Now the team is building agents that handle integrations on their own, so a request turns into a working integration without waiting on an engineer.
Very few roles give you a front-row seat to how Fortune 500s evaluate software and what converts a proof-of-value into a signed contract. You'll learn how architecture decisions ripple into adoption, and you'll do it working directly with our founding team.
Why Cogent
Cyberdefense is becoming a defining engineering challenge of this era.
Cogent is building AI agents that protect the world's largest organizations from cyber threats. Attackers are using AI to move at 100x the speed and scale they could before, and defenders need the same leverage. We use AI to map how every piece of a company's environment fits together, so we can autonomously prioritize and fix the vulnerabilities that matter most.
We've assembled a remarkable FDE team to take it on. The engineers here have done this before: former founders, Palantir FDEs, graduates of Stanford and Berkeley - and they operate with the intensity and ownership that comes from building something early. This talent density means you'll grow faster than you would almost anywhere else.
If you're an engineer going through the reckoning right now - realizing that the definition of building software is changing, and that the value is shifting from pure code to the systems and judgment around it - and you care as much about the customer's problem as the code that solves it, we want to talk to you.
