What is a forward deployed engineer? A first-hand answer
A forward deployed engineer sits with the people who have the problem, builds the fix and ships it. What the work is, how it differs, and how to hire one.
Forward Deployed Engineer · Indianapolis
I work where software meets the business: the internal tools and last-mile automations that rarely get budget or time, yet quietly compound into serious productivity.
From a real problem to production
Spec-driven AI engineering, end to end.
Issue status, driven by the staging automation
Todothe spec’s tasks.md lands on staging
In Progressevery task checked off on staging
Done
Playing — select any step to explore it yourself.Walk through the whole workflow
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Two Kiro Workflows recipes turn my issue to staging to main pipeline into orchestrated agent steps. The runtime validator caught two bugs no JSON parse would.
Which Node.js builds your Amplify app? The log won't say
Amplify Hosting picks Node 18 or 20 silently, and the SSR runtime follows the build. How I found out, and the .nvmrc plus nvm pin every project uses now.
Every Amplify branch needs its own Stripe webhook
Amplify Gen 2 gives each branch its own webhook Lambda URL, so Stripe needs one endpoint per branch. Mine had none. How I found it and fixed it safely.