Panel · SF Tech Week 2026

Forward Deployed Engineer: Hear From Experts, Then Try It

Name: Forward Deployed Engineer: Hear From Experts, Then Try It
Start: 2026-10-10
Location: Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Oct 10, 2026Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

Event poster: Forward Deployed Engineer, panel discussion and hackathon with a $1,000 prize pool, October 10, 4pm, Stanford, part of SF Tech Week, with panelists and mentors from Y Combinator, Visibl Semiconductors, Roadrunner, OpenAI and Bloomberg Beta. — The event poster.

Six panelists, 45 minutes, one question: what does a forward-deployed engineer actually do, and where does the role go next? It was one of the few SF Tech Week events held on Stanford's campus, and the organizers counted more than 1,100 RSVPs. Afterward the room turned into a two-hour build sprint with a $1,000 prize pool: take a messy problem nobody has written down, scope it with a mentor playing the client, and ship a prototype.

My take
If you're still solving the same problem from scratch for customer #50, you've scaled the team, not the product. The leverage is turning what you learn in the field into something every later customer inherits.

On stage with: Perry Klebahn, James Cham, Vinayaka (Vinny) Srinivas, Kabir Walia, Santiago Campo
Organized by: Cheyoung Ahn, Bekhruz Malikov, Angelica Ly

Case study: the idea in practice Event page