Forward Deployed Engineering at Cursor — Pauline Brunet

Cursor describes forward deployed engineers as senior technical operators who discover use cases, build in customer codebases, and relay recurring needs to product teams. Its initial hires have **5+ years of software engineering experience**.

For agent deployments, require a customer working team, define a measurable baseline, validate with humans, and leave documentation behind. Scope around a directional **six-week window** and tie outcomes to **revenue, cost, or risk** rather than raw agent spend.

The model is explicitly not training, routine rollout, or staff augmentation. Cursor also recommends declining poor-fit use cases and using integrators for work outside the FDE team’s strengths; the talk offers operating guidance, not comparative deployment data.