Be an FDE

Learn the role that's growing 1,165% year over year.

A structured program for engineering students who want to become forward deployed engineers — the people AI vendors send in to make deployments actually work.

Coming soonSee the syllabus →

Who this is for

Built for engineering students.

Who
Engineering students, 2nd to 4th year
Format
Live sessions + on-demand video, so it fits around a college schedule
Taught by
Practicing FDEs and industry experts, not purely academic instructors
Outcome
A working foundation across all three buckets Grapnel vets its own FDE bench against

Syllabus

The Three Buckets — as a course.

The same framework Grapnel uses to vet its FDE bench. Sector depth — cybersecurity, fintech, healthcare, and more — lives on our Industries pages when you want the full picture.

Bucket 1

Software Engineering

The floor, not the differentiator

  1. Working inside live, constrained systems (not greenfield code)
  2. Reading and extending unfamiliar codebases fast
  3. Version control, code review, and change management under a client's process
  4. Debugging under pressure — isolating faults in someone else's system
  5. Integration engineering: APIs, auth, data pipelines, and the failure points between them
  6. Testing discipline for production-facing changes

Taught by Rakesh Chinnasamy

Bucket 2

AI Systems Fluency

Where most pipelines fall short

  1. How LLMs actually behave — capabilities, limits, and failure modes
  2. Prompt and context engineering for real deployments
  3. Eval design — measuring whether a deployment is actually working
  4. RAG and context management fundamentals
  5. Diagnosing "is this a model problem or an integration problem"
  6. Responsible use of AI systems in regulated or sensitive environments

Taught by Dr. Ajit Kumar Pasayat

Bucket 3

Customer Skills

The bucket nobody else screens for

  1. Reading a room — stakeholder dynamics in an enterprise client
  2. Translating technical work into business impact
  3. Delivering an unwelcome recommendation without losing trust
  4. Scoping ambiguous client requests into concrete deliverables
  5. Negotiation and expectation-setting under pressure
  6. Knowing when to invoke kill-criteria — and how to say so

Taught by John Rogan

Format

Live and on-demand.

Live sessions

Real-time sessions with FDEs and industry experts, with room for direct Q&A.

On-demand video

Recorded content you can work through around your class schedule.

Mentors

Taught by people who do the work.

Practicing forward deployed engineers and industry experts — roster confirmed mentors only.

Rakesh Chinnasamy

Software Engineering

Rakesh Chinnasamy

Software Engineer, Qualcomm

5G modem software engineer at Qualcomm, previously MediaTek. Pursuing an MS in AI at IIIT Hyderabad.

Dr. Ajit Kumar Pasayat

AI Systems Fluency

Dr. Ajit Kumar Pasayat

Professor, KIIT University

PhD from IIT Kharagpur. Researches machine learning, deep learning, and large language models.

John Rogan

Customer Skills

Also covers Software Engineering · AI Systems Fluency

John Rogan

FDE, Finance of America · CS, University of Michigan

Covers Customer Skills end-to-end, and contributes across Software Engineering and AI Systems Fluency.

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