ENGINEERING ROLES

FDE vs sre

Quick answer

An SRE protects uptime for a service; an FDE protects the outcome of a deployment, which includes uptime but also adoption and accuracy.

	SRE	FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER
MAIN OUTPUT	Reliability and incident response	A working deployment inside one customer's systems
CLIENT TIME	Much lower than an FDE	High: discovery, demos and handover every week
WRITES PRODUCTION CODE	Yes	Yes
PAY	See FDE salary in India for bands by experience and city.

Fixed test sets and scoring that show whether an AI system is good enough.

Learning how the customer's work really happens before building anything.

Turning a wish into a bounded piece of work with agreed outcomes.