FDE roles and responsibilities

An FDE owns the outcome of a deployment, not just a piece of code. In practice that breaks down into six responsibilities.

1. Understand the problem

Run discovery with the users, the sponsor and the owners of the systems involved. Map the workflow and agree what success means in numbers.

2. Scope the work

Turn the ask into a bounded proof of concept with acceptance criteria, and say clearly what is out of scope.

3. Build against real data

Write the integrations, pipelines, retrieval systems or agents the deployment needs, against the customer's real data and systems.

4. Deploy safely

Ship inside the customer's infrastructure and security rules, with monitoring and, for AI systems, evals and guardrails.

5. Hand over

Document how to run, monitor and roll back the system, and train the customer's team to operate it.

6. Feed back to product

Report what the product should do differently, so the next deployment is faster.

See the checklists for production readiness and handover.