I recently recorded a session with Ken Muse and a Redgate Flyway Solution Engineer. It was a fun session using GitHub and AI, and better managing the code in an automated fashion to bring some determinism to AI coding. I’m hoping it will be released soon, and you can see a vision of how you can better wrangle your AI agents and reduce risk and increase reliability.

When we started our discussion, Ken noted that he is an AI forward deployed engineer for GitHub. His job is to work with teams in how to use agentic coding. When we were first prepping, I had never heard the Forward Deployed Engineer title, which is apparently getting popular. It was in an issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Deep Dives last year, and I must have missed that issue. Apparently, this is a role that works part of the time with customer teams and part of the time with product or engineering teams.

In other words, a software engineer with a new title who gets paid more than a software engineer.

Titles are always a funny thing to me. I’ve seen people who write computer code go from programmers to developers to software engineers to forward deployed engineers. The job is the same. I work with a team of others who write code, or I work with a customer who wants code and might need help writing it. Or, if I’m working at a company that works with outside customers, this is really a consultant role renamed.

DBAs have had a similar change. I started as a DBA because they made a lot of money at the time. I moved from programmer to DBA, without much change in skill, but with a nice pay rise at a new company. I left that role before we got Data Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Database Reliability Engineers, and who knows what else. However, if I had stayed in a company, I’m sure I would have been changing my title periodically to earn more money.

Certainly, I’d still have been adding skills that give me a reason to change my title, but I’m not sure the job would have changed. Instead, I’d be trying to grow my career not only with seniority and time, but with new skills and title changes.

Maybe that’s a good reason to keep learning new skills. New skills let you claim you need a new title. Hopefully, you pick a title that HR doesn’t have any data about, so they have to set a new range for the position that’s above your current range.

Viola! Instant raise.

Not a bad career plan. Just make sure you’re adding some skills that are asked for in job descriptions, including soft skills. After all, a forward deployed engineer is going to be working with others, so communication is going to be key.

Steve Jones

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