Software Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer

Software Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer

United States, Washington, Redmond

Job description

Company and benefits

Job number

200057324

Date posted

Oct 01, 2026

Work site 3 days / week in-office

Travel Less than 25%

Profession Software Engineering

Discipline Software Engineering

Role type Individual Contributor

Employment type Full-Time

Overview

We're entering a new era defined by the power of AI to transform how organizations operate and innovate. At Microsoft, we're building the next generation of AI-powered platforms and production-grade solutions that help customers solve complex challenges and create meaningful business impact.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you'll work at the intersection of advanced technology and real-world customer outcomes. Embedded directly with customers, you'll partner closely with stakeholders to understand their most critical challenges and rapidly design, build, and deploy solutions that move from concept to production.

Working in small, cross-functional teams alongside engineers, data scientists, product managers, and domain experts, you'll own the end-to-end delivery of AI-powered production-grade applications, data solutions, and software systems. You'll apply modern engineering practices and the AI-enabled engineering practices across the development lifecycle to help customers accelerate decision making, improve operations, and unlock new opportunities.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customers and stakeholders to understand business challenges, define success criteria, and translate needs into technical solutions.
• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate secure, reliable, and scalable production-grade software systems and services that apply AI and data capabilities where appropriate.
• Rapidly move from concept to prototype to production, iterating alongside customers to deliver measurable business outcomes.
• Build production-quality software that connects customer systems, data, and AI capabilities into reliable end-to-end solutions.
• Apply engineering best practices including code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation, and security-first development.
• Drive end-to-end ownership of customer solutions, monitoring performance, reliability, quality, and maintainability, and continuously improving deployed systems after release.
• Collaborate across engineering, data science, product management, design, and customer teams to solve complex technical problems.
• Contribute reusable components, reference implementations, and best practices that can be leveraged across customer engagements.
• Share insights and learnings from customer deployments to help improve Microsoft products, platforms, and engineering practices.
• Foster a culture of learning, inclusion, innovation, and continuous improvement while contributing to the growth of the broader FDE community.
• Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

• Required Qualifications
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScri