Natalie Meurer, Head of Agent Engineering at Sierra, discusses the evolving role of forward deployed engineers (FDEs) in the AI era. She explains why Sierra coined the term 'agent engineer' to better capture the technical nature of the work — building conversational AI agents for enterprise customer service. Most customer-specific work happens at the orchestration layer rather than the model layer. Meurer argues that product engineering and FDE are converging: product engineers should talk to customers, and FDEs should build product. She predicts generalists will become more valuable than specialists as AI lowers the cost of writing code, and that the engineering craft will absorb what we currently call FDE, go-to-market engineering, and AI engineering into a more holistic definition.
