Deployment Strategist
The non-engineering half of forward-deployed work: owns the problem framing, the stakeholders and the direction of a deployment.
A deployment strategist is embedded at a customer like an FDE but is measured on framing rather than building: which problem is worth solving, who has to agree, what success means, and what the sequence of work should be. They may write little or no production code.
Worked example: a strategist spends the first three weeks establishing that the “AI for claims” ask is really two separate problems with different owners, and gets the customer to fund the smaller one first — a decision worth more than any amount of engineering on the larger one. Gotcha: this is not a junior route into engineering; it is a parallel career with a different ladder, and moving across later is harder than people expect.