What a forward-deployed engineer actually does

The title gets used loosely. In practice it means one engineer is accountable for a workflow reaching production, and is embedded closely enough with the people who run it to see where the written process and the real process diverge.

The first week is listening

Sessions with the operators, not the sponsors. The exceptions they handle by habit are the requirements nobody wrote down.

for case in dataset:
    result = agent.run(case.input)
    assert result.decision == case.expected, case.id

Then a vertical slice against the real systems — narrow, end to end, and measured — before anything gets broadened.