- Intercept + slope: top school or early-at-fast-growing-startup
- Bridge between customers and product
The FDE is the bridge between customers and the product: leveraging the existing product to get the most out of it for the customer’s needs, and feeding product development and roadmap based on what customers need next. Today, because of bandwidth, roughly 80% of an FDE’s time is spent on customers (getting deeper into an organization to understand how they operate and where the bottlenecks are, configuring the product, onboarding new use cases, building smaller features that speed those up) and about 20% on customer-agnostic work (patterns across customers, core features that solve many needs at once). The ideal steady state is closer to 50-50, where any FDE can help a customer without depending on context only they hold. Day to day, about 25% of their time is calls or meetings with end users and decision-makers to grow product usage, either deeper adoption of existing use cases or net-new use cases that drive new volume.
Important framing Omar stressed: FDE work is never building customer-specific products or features. Everything is built into the core product as a lever; only the configuration is customer-specific. Problems start customer-specific until Reform spots the repeatability across company types.
Omar assesses people on intercept and slope. Intercept is existing skills and experience against what the role needs: has the person already cleared a high bar, in education (a top-tier university) or in work (ideally a well-known, fast-growing startup, with big tech as a second-order signal). Slope is how quickly they learn and progress: an early engineer at a fast-growing startup who clearly helped it grow, or someone at a lesser-known company who worked their way up to a strong position delivering real value. For FDE specifically, the core skills (doing the right discovery, asking the right questions, understanding the underlying pains, and building the right solution) matter much more than logistics/industry context, which can be learned quickly. Prior experience deploying similar systems to similar customers is a strong bonus.
What You’ll Own
- The full lifecycle of high-stakes customer projects: architecture, design, deployment, and continuous optimization
- Deep engagement with customer executives and teams to understand needs and translate them into technical strategies
- Becoming a power user of Reform and configuring the workspace, onboarding new use cases, and building smaller features that speed up customer processes
- Feeding customer and field insight into product strategy and roadmap
- Hands-on support for product reliability
Requirements
- Strong technical aptitude with experience in a customer-facing engineering role
- Exceptional communication and a track record of building strong B2B relationships
- Can do the right discovery, ask the right questions, find the underlying pain, and build the right solution
- Can read and write Python, Node, and Next.js, with a solid grasp of data-driven architectures
- Solves complex technical problems in fast-paced, dynamic environments
- 3+ years
Who Will Thrive Here
- A customer-facing engineer who loves getting deep into how a business works and building the right solution on an existing platform
- A high-slope learner who cleared a serious bar in school or at a fast-growing startup
- Someone who communicates exceptionally well with executives and end users
- Someone excited to reshape a critical, messy industry, who does not need to own greenfield product to be happy