The title claim of the video. Asked for the top three roles that will explode in the next 5 years, Eric names 10:48:

  1. Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
  2. AI Platform Engineer
  3. AI Feature Engineer

Roles 2 and 3 are related but, in Eric's view, "distinct enough" to count separately 11:34.

1. Forward Deployed Engineer

  • What it is: an engineer who goes on site with a company's customer and is responsible for translating customer demands or needs into software, using whatever platform you're selling them 10:48.
  • Why it grows: it is interdisciplinary — it combines on-the-ground PM/support work with an understanding of your own codebase 10:48 11:08.
  • The core skill is decomposition and translation — the same skill from 06, applied to customers instead of agents 11:08.
  • The concrete example: the user says "this button doesn't work", but what they really mean is there's a whole different feature they didn't even know they needed. Users latch onto the wrong particular detail; the FDE is the voice of the customer, translating it into engineering 11:08.

2. AI Platform Engineer

  • What it is: the person building the foundation on which agents get built 11:34.
  • The decisions they own, with the tools Eric names:
    • Evaluation — Brain Trust, Judgment Labs, or similar foundational software 11:34
    • Inference / self-hosted models — Fireworks, Modal, or other providers 11:54
  • The scope: platform infrastructure foundations upon which agentic capabilities get built 11:54.
  • Host's shorthand, which Eric accepts: "kind of like the AI IT department" 11:54.

3. AI Feature Engineer

  • What it is: once the foundational infrastructure layer exists company-wide, this is the person building bespoke agentic features on top of it 12:11.
  • The worked example: building an agent that does summarization really well, grounded in PDFs specific to insurance if you're in the insurance vertical 12:11.
  • The distinction from role 2 is layer, not seniority: platform builds the substrate, feature builds the vertical-specific product on it 12:11.

How the three stack

flowchart TD
    P["AI Platform Engineer<br/>evals · inference · infra foundations"]
    F["AI Feature Engineer<br/>bespoke agentic features per vertical"]
    E["Forward Deployed Engineer<br/>on-site · voice of the customer"]
    C[Customer]
    P --> F
    F --> E
    E <--> C
    C -.->|"real need, badly stated"| E