What it means to be a Forward Deployed Engineer at Orb

When I joined Orb as the first hire, there wasn’t a playbook in place. There was no blueprint for what my role would look like or even what Orb would become. I started as a founding engineer, building the product from the ground up. That meant wearing every hat imaginable, from writing infrastructure code to jumping on calls with our earliest users.

But something became clear early on: I loved talking to customers. I loved hearing their feedback, understanding what was working (and what wasn’t), and then going back to code up better solutions. That instinct to listen deeply and then build thoughtfully became the foundation for the role I hold now and the team I lead: Forward Deployed Engineering.

What is Forward Deployed Engineering at Orb?

If you’ve come across this job title before, you might be picturing consultants embedding inside customer teams, building custom features, or writing one-off integrations. That’s not what we do at Orb.

Our version of Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is built around two responsibilities:

1. We work directly with customers during onboarding to understand exactly where they’re getting stuck or where their implementation could be stronger.
   
   
2. We take that insight and either build or advocate for generalizable product improvements that solve those problems at scale—not just for one customer, but for all of them.
   

We’re embedded with customer-facing teams, such as customer success managers (CSMs) and support, but we’re also fully integrated into engineering. We ship production code,  influence the roadmap, and help define what “great” looks like for our products’ onboarding experience.

This duality of customer empathy and engineering execution is what makes FDEs at Orb so impactful.

Our job is to listen carefully, then build meaningfully. It’s not just to solve a problem for one customer, but to make the product better for all of them.”

The shape of our work

When a customer signs on with Orb, our CSMs are the primary point of contact. They help customers define their goals and navigate the product. FDEs join those conversations to go deeper, especially when the questions get more technical. For example, API design, data structure, webhook configuration, real-time alerting, invoice logic, and usage tracking. 

We're the engineering voice in the room, helping customers architect their integration and map their business model to Orb's capabilities. However, we don’t write one-off code for a single customer. Instead, we look for patterns where multiple customers are hitting the same friction point, and we turn that insight into roadmap recommendations or features we build ourselves.

We don’t build custom workarounds. We build product solutions that scale.”

One week, we might be advising a fast-growing AI startup on how to structure event ingestion. Next, we’re shipping a new onboarding tool that helps all customers avoid that same confusion. That’s the FDE rhythm.

A real story: From feedback to feature in under a week

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers, a company that provides digital infrastructure for mailing and physical goods, was struggling with a simple but frustrating gap. They couldn’t delete invoice line items through our API.

They weren’t the first to ask for this. We’d heard versions of it before, and it was somewhere on the backlog. Because I was close to their onboarding and saw how it was blocking their workflow, I prioritized it.

Within a week, we shipped the endpoint.

It’s now available to every customer. It’s not because one team asked loudly enough, but because we had an engineer embedded in the conversation who understood both the impact and the implementation effort.

That’s the superpower of this role.

We’re engineers with context—able to act fast because we understand both the customer pain and the product architecture.”

Who thrives in this role?

This isn’t your typical software engineering job. It’s perfect for someone who:

• Loves talking to users: You’ll be in the room, in the Slack channel, in the thick of it.
  
• Thinks like a product manager: You don’t just fix bugs; you identify patterns and shape features.
  
• Builds with empathy: You care about how customers experience the product.
  
• Moves fast and independently: Our team motto is literally: You can just do things.
  

We look for folks who want to be more than engineers. They want to be customer advocates, product thinkers, and problem solvers. They want to own outcomes, not just ship tickets.

Why this matters at Orb

Billing is complex. It touches everything from engineering to finance to customer support. Most SaaS and GenAI companies require billing systems that are flexible, accurate, and easy to scale; however, legacy tools often make this challenging.

At Orb, we’re building something different: a usage-based billing platform that makes it easy for companies to adapt pricing, track usage, and accelerate revenue without disrupting their operations.

Forward Deployed Engineers are crucial to this mission because they help ensure our product works for the customer.

We don’t measure our success by the number of lines of code we ship. We measure it by how quickly our customers get value and how seamlessly they can grow.

If you’re a builder who loves customer conversations, or a product-minded engineer who wants to see their work have immediate real-world impact, FDE at Orb might be your dream job.

Here’s the bottom line: At Orb, you can just do things.

You’ll make the product and our customers better because of it.

Want to join us?

Check out our careers page. We’re hiring Forward Deployed Engineers now, and we’d love to hear from you.