Forward Deployed Engineering at Aampe
Helping our customers bring all kinds of context to their agents
We just named our first Forward Deployed Engineer at Aampe. I first heard the term 15 years ago - in 2010 - while working in the US Department of Defense deployed to Afghanistan. I didnât know anything about private sector SaaS at the time, but as someone hired partly as an intelligence analyst and partly as an anthropologist, the concept seemed pretty obvious to me. A central method in my graduate training was participant observation - your research was expected to be immersed in the context and activities of the people you were studying and seeking to understand. The engineering I was doing was data engineering, but I knew data wasnât much use unless you knew exactly how it was being collected and generated - you had to see where it came from up close - if you wanted to be able to use it effectively.
Now here we are in 2025 and software is on its way to thoroughly eating the world - except - software has been all rules-based. Every bit of it has required humans to tell it exactly what to do under very specific conditions. That just doesnât scale. Our product managers sit in our offices and whiteboard âthe user journeyâ and our marketers idealize their perfect campaign sequence in a canvas and none of it reflects any of the gritty and critical detail of our usersâ actual experiences or interests or intentions.
Our hardware enables our applications to sit right in the pockets of our customers - accompanying them as they take a walk, or stand in line at the grocery store, informing the way they live their very rich lives in an incredibly textured world - but our software is entirely bound up in the cripplingly confined borders of our whiteboards and canvases.
We founded Aampe to set consumer applications free - no longer rule engines - but interfaces and messaging actively managed by agents that can forward deploy into the world with their designated user.
The implications of this are incredible. In fact I spend a good number of hours each week in a slight daze at how little we realize the power and extent of what our software can be capable of.
What does this mean? It means the actual Context we live in as human individuals is incredibly rich. Thereâs absolutely no reason that our applications shouldnât be able to incorporate and narrate around that rich Context.
For example, we live in and through the Weather. Every application should be piping in rich weather feeds as user context:
Youâre a ride hailing app and your user completes a ride - you know itâs raining - send them a message thanking them for taking the ride and tell them you âhope they stay dry.â
Youâre a fashion commerce app and you know thereâs a cold spell this coming weekend in a userâs area - let your user know about the warm jacket that just came on sale.
Sports are at the center of many peopleâs lives. Every application should be piping in fun sports feeds:
Youâre a food delivery app and you have the NFL schedule for the team in your userâs city - tell them the best pizza they can order for the upcoming game. Or learn that they actually follow a different NFL team.
Youâre a running app - give your a user a clip of a brilliant NBA athlete sharing why they train and what training means to them, so your user gets that extra motivation to get out and run.
Historical references, literary characters, lyrics from your favorite pop star - itâs all available in data and through feeds - pipe it to your agents and let them learn and weave wonderfully specific Context into your usersâ lives.
We have to push for a major leap forward in how consumer technology operates. Aampeâs agentic infrastructure provisions agents that can learn over whatever context you give them. Conventional software could never take advantage of all that context because the human rules that governed it would have simply broken down under the weight of it all. But agents can handle that level of context. We just have to give it to them.
And thatâs what Forward Deployed Engineers at Aampe will be doing for our customers and partners: leaning in and developing right along with them to ingest and enable massive amounts of context - to push the boundaries of whatâs possible with agentic infrastructure.
I canât think of a more exciting and rewarding kind of work. 15 years ago I would have completely leaped at this kind of work. Iâm so lucky and happy to be a part of it now.