The Two Questions
Do you have to sell something technically complicated to a non-technical buyer? And do you have a platform — or the will to invest in one? Two honest answers route you to FDE, DevRel, or sales-led growth. Then the hiring profile: an FDE is nothing more than a customer-facing software engineer.
FDE is in vogue, and it's easy to want things that are in vogue — the same way it's easy to want "AI" because everyone else is doing it. But the function is expensive, structurally demanding, and wrong for most companies. Whether it's right for yours comes down to two questions, answered honestly.
Question one: do you need it?
Not want — need. Is there some corner of your business where you must take a technically complicated thing to market with a non-technical buyer? That's the only situation that calls for FDE.
If your motion is technical-to-technical, there are great things you can do with DevRel and developer engagement. If you're selling more traditional SaaS, a sales-led motion works. Both are cheaper, both are better understood, and neither requires you to staff engineers you'd trust alone in a boardroom.
Question two: do you have a platform?
Or phrased honestly: are you willing to invest in building one? However tempting it is to hire engineers who can go make you money, if they aren't building on top of shared primitives, you are in for a very bad time. The maintenance burden on the team will be enormous even with a robust platform — never mind without one.
The profile
Both answers yes? Then the hiring bar, in one line: an FDE is nothing more than a customer-facing software engineer. Someone you would hire as a software engineer on your team — and, at the same time, someone you'd trust in front of a customer in some shape or capacity. It's an intersection, not a compromise: a salesperson who can't build, and a builder who can't sit with a buyer, are each only half the role.
Rippling's FDE function went from its first hire to roughly 25 people in a year — the demand side of the two questions was never in doubt. The discipline is on the second question: the teams that scale keep score of what fraction of each new deployment came from existing primitives, because that number is the difference between an FDE program and 25 independent contractors.