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FDE Week 1: From a Founding FDE @ Notion and O'Reilly Author

Hosted by Paden Gayle

Fri, Oct 2, 2026

6:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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120 students

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Become a Forward Deployed Engineer: The Future-Proof Path for Software Engineers
Paden Gayle
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What you'll learn

See what a real first week looks like

What lands on your plate before you touch the codebase, and why almost none of it looks like the job description.

Know who actually decides if you succeed

The people outside engineering you'll work with daily, what they need from you, and how to earn their trust early

Avoid the trap new FDEs fall into

The instinct that feels productive on day two, why it's the wrong move, and what to do with that time instead.

Why this topic matters

Most FDE job postings describe a role that does not exist. They say you'll build alongside customers. They do not say your first week is mostly listening to people describe a problem nobody has defined yet, in rooms where you're the only engineer. Getting the shape of the work wrong costs you a month solving the wrong thing. I do this job. Not a version of it from five years ago, and not a version I read about.

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg

I'm a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Notion, where I built the technical delivery model our team uses to run high-stakes enterprise migrations. I'm also writing The Forward Deployed Engineer's Handbook for O'Reilly, the first definitive guide to the role.

Before Notion I was a Software Engineer at Google and Bloomberg, building certificate authority infrastructure and large-scale data platforms. I've also coached 600+ engineers through career transitions into top companies.

I teach this because I'm doing the job right now, not summarizing it from articles. Everything in my workshops comes from live engagements: real scoping decisions, real security reviews, real stakeholder fights. If you want to break into Applied AI, learn it from the trenches.

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