What Forward Deployed Engineers Do at Atlassian
As AI continues to raise the bar for product development, businesses around the world need engineers who can connect the dots quickly, perform under pressure and collaborate cross-functionally.
That’s what Atlassian’s forward deployed engineers do. They work at the forefront of applied AI, partnering directly with customers and cross-functional teams to close what may be the single biggest risk to any company’s AI strategy: the adoption gap. AI features only create value when customers actually adopt them, and FDEs exist to make that adoption real, turning vague business problems into clear technical solutions like agents built with the Rovo tool, along with automations, connectors and repeatable deployment patterns.
Forward deployed engineering is also one of the fastest-growing roles in tech, up 729 percent in the past year, with every major AI company investing in it. The bet behind that growth is simple: The engineers closest to the customer will define who wins with AI.
What Does Atlassian Do?
Atlassian provides collaboration and productivity software solutions for 350,000+ companies worldwide. The company’s products include Jira, Confluence, Loom and Trello.
As these engineers help organizations close the adoption gap, they are also learning how to use the technology more effectively within their own teams and incorporating those findings into the product suite.
“By embedding deeply in their workflows, we can identify high-impact use cases and bring those learnings back to our product teams,” Lead Principal Forward Deployed Engineer Hülya Pamukcu Crowell said.
The work is fast-paced, impactful and reliant on those who push themselves outside of their comfort zones, such as Sri Ramya Mallipudi, a forward deployed engineer lead.
“An FDE needs to be able to say, ‘I’ve got this,’” Mallipudi said.
Being a forward deployed engineer here isn’t just about creating code; it’s about shaping the future of AI-led teamwork while defining an emerging, dynamic field.
What Is Forward Deployed Engineering?
Forward deployed engineering is an emerging field in which engineers work closely with customers to build integrations and deploy software and AI solutions for specific business needs. The role connects product development with real-world customer problems.
What Makes the Forward Deployed Engineering Team Different
What makes the company’s FDE model different from bespoke customer engineering, and from roles at other companies, is that engineers stay close to both the code and the customer, putting them in a uniquely impactful position. Rather than placing FDEs within consulting or pre-sales, Atlassian's FDEs are part of R&D, carry an engineering title and do deeply technical work. There is a much shorter distance between them and the person using their code.
“Every customer is different, and that forces you to stay close to the product, the latest capabilities and the real problems customers need us to solve,” Mallipudi said.
These engineers also hit the ground running, thanks to a solution called the Teamwork Graph. Built on more than 20 years of data on how teams work and containing over 150 billion unique connections, it connects and contextualizes information across both first-party and third-party applications while preserving permissions, giving engineers a shared knowledge layer for building AI workflows and helping customers see real business outcomes in weeks rather than quarters.
“I joined in March and have already worked with three or four customers,” Forward Deployed Engineer Abhinav Thomas said. “They’re seeing significant value and telling us directly that it is helping a lot of people, in one case saving about 80 percent of their time.”
The results show up fast and by name. Partnering with Expedia, FDE-built agents archived 600,000 Confluence pages and saved more than 6,700 hours of labor. This work impressed the customer’s CTO enough to request a Phase 2 expansion and that work now anchors a lead earnings-call testimonial. The impact often reaches beyond a single customer, too: When one FDE built a missing Rovo agent export and import path from sandbox to production, it unblocked more than 15 enterprise accounts at once, including Cisco.
What Do These Forward Deployed Engineers Build?
Forward deployed engineers at Atlassian build AI-powered solutions such as Rovo agents, automations, connectors and repeatable deployment patterns. They also bring insights from customer engagements back to the product teams, which is a practice not commonly found at other companies in the industry, where work can be limited to specific customers. That means FDEs at Atlassian have greater opportunities for large-scale impact.
Why Build a Forward Deployed Engineering Career Here?
Forward deployed engineers aren’t just making a tangible impact on the customers they work with. They’re building one of the most versatile career paths in tech. Becoming an FDE is a career accelerator, not a detour. The customer context and cross-functional judgment engineers develop position them to influence product strategy, not just execute it.
“It’s an accelerated form of learning and experience you will not get in another role,” Mallipudi said.
Whether they’re bridging product and customer complexity, incorporating findings into their teams or leading customer engagements, forward deployed engineers are constantly refining their skill sets while delivering visible business value.
Atlassian FDEs Make AI Work in the Real World
Everyone is building AI, but forward deployed engineers make it work in the real world. You don’t need to be an AI/ML engineer to succeed as an FDE. You’re an AI practitioner, not an AI engineer. Rather than building models, FDEs are experts at using AI and understanding how it fits into the products, right-sizing solutions so customers adopt them and see value.
Forward deployed engineering is part full-stack development, part product management, part customer consultation and fully AI enabled, taking customers from discovery to impact fast and driving the tech industry forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Atlassian do?
Atlassian provides collaboration and productivity software solutions for more than 350,000 companies worldwide. Its core product suite includes workplace tools such as Jira, Confluence, Loom and Trello.
What is forward deployed engineering?
Forward deployed engineering is an emerging field in tech where engineers work closely with customers to build integrations, solve specific business problems and deploy custom software and AI solutions. Rather than working solely on isolated code or high-level consulting, forward deployed engineers bridge the gap between product development and real-world customer usage, ensuring that users successfully adopt and extract value from technical features.
At Atlassian specifically, forward deployed engineers carry deeply technical R&D titles, embedding directly within customer workflows to build AI integrations while bringing key usage insights back to internal product development teams.
What do forward deployed engineers build at Atlassian?
Forward deployed engineers at Atlassian build AI-powered technical solutions, including custom AI agents designed to automate complex workflows and task management as well as system connections and automated pathways that integrate third-party applications and clean data across enterprise environments. They also develop reusable technical frameworks, such as sandbox-to-production export and import paths for custom AI agents, which can be deployed across multiple enterprise accounts simultaneously to accelerate AI adoption.
