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How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Ramp — Leo Mehr
Takeaway
Effective forward deployed engineering combines disciplined problem scoping with incremental automation of the entire delivery workflow.
Summary
- Ramp places forward deployed engineering inside engineering to adapt its core product and agentic features for large enterprise customers.
- The first principle, always be scoping, requires validating urgency, users, workarounds, customer resources, and applicability to other accounts before implementation.
- A reimbursement project wasted Android development effort because the customer mandated iOS, demonstrating the cost of unchecked assumptions.
- The second principle, scale with tokens, applies agents across context gathering, scoping, specification, and coding; a Notion intake agent reduced initial clarification latency from hours or days to seconds.
forward-deployed-engineeringramprequirements
Original description
It's Friday night, an enterprise sales rep needs an SAP S4 HANA integration to hit quota, and the reflexive Forward Deployed answer is yes. Leo Mehr's first principle is to pause instead: always be scoping. Saying yes to everything buries the team and often does not even serve the customer, so the job is to weigh what actually matters against the rest of the queue and decide with that context. Ramp's FDE function looks different from its Palantir origins, pointed at enterprise customers, but the discipline is the same: scope hard before you roll up your sleeves and ship. The second half is what tokens change. Look at the FDE pipeline and ask which stages an agent can take over. Intake is a good one: requests pour in through account managers and solutions engineers, and someone has to read each and turn it into a spec. Ramp wired that step to an agent with Notion as the surface, and after a couple of iterations account reps were using it directly. The unglamorous parts are what make it work: an agent harness, evals with rubrics and human feedback, and past requests and help articles as grounding. The close is that the future of Forward Deployed needs both, humans for judgment and agents for the volume. Speaker info: https://x.com/leomehr / leomehr https://leomehr.com/ Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction: FDE principles at Ramp 2:10 - Principle one: always be scoping 3:16 - The Friday night SAP integration ask 5:04 - When scoping goes wrong 6:33 - Using agents for the FDE pipeline 7:57 - Automating request intake into specs 9:14 - Building the spec agent in Notion 11:16 - The agent harness and evals 13:27 - The future of FDE needs both