Your first Forward Deployed Engineer worked out.
Customers ask for them by name, implementations that used to take a quarter now take three weeks, and the Board wants to know why you have not hired five more.
This is the moment most SaaS companies get wrong.
Scaling an FDE function from one person to ten is not the same job as making the first hire, and the teams that treat it as “hire more of the same” usually end up with a burnt-out founding FDE, a muddled middle, and a function nobody can describe.
Here is the sequencing, structure and compensation thinking that gets you from zero to ten without breaking what made the first hire work.
Why you cannot just Clone your first FDE
The first FDE succeeds because they are a generalist under pressure. They scope their own work, invent their own playbook, and carry the Customer’s technical voice back into product because nobody else will.
Hire five more people with exactly that profile and you get five people inventing five playbooks.
Enterprise Customers start getting different implementation experiences depending on who they are assigned.
Your product team gets contradictory field feedback.
And your Founding FDE, who should be codifying what works, is instead refereeing.
A Function is not ten copies of hire one. It is a deliberate mix of profiles arranged around the playbook your first hire proved.
Hires Two and Three: Deployment Capacity
The second and third hires should look like slightly narrower versions of the first. Strong engineers, customer-comfortable, but joining a function that now has one proven way of running an implementation rather than a blank page.
The mistake at this stage is hiring for the blank page again.
Blank-page people are rare and expensive, and by hire two you no longer need the page filled. You need throughput. Look for Engineers who have done delivery or integration work and want more customer contact, not visionaries who will fight the playbook.
This is also the point to write the playbook down. Not a wiki nobody reads – a genuine artefact: how we scope, how we run week one, what good looks like at go-live.
If your founding FDE cannot find two days to write it, that is your first sign the Function is already understaffed.
Hires Four to Six: The Shape Appears
Somewhere around hire four, patterns emerge. Certain industries keep recurring. Certain integrations come up in every deal. This is where you stop hiring identical generalists and start hiring around the work you actually have.
That might mean an FDE who knows healthcare data cold, or one who has lived inside the ecosystem you keep integrating with.
Specialisation at this stage is a multiplier: a domain-fluent FDE walks into a Customer’s stand-up already speaking the language, and trust arrives weeks earlier.
It is also where you need your first genuine mentorship structure. New FDEs should shadow a full implementation before they run one. It feels slow. It is far faster than letting someone learn on a paying Customer and spending six months repairing the account afterwards.
Hires Seven to Ten: Leadership, or Drift
By seven or eight people, the Function needs a leader, and this is the decision that determines whether you get to ten in good shape. The default move is to promote the Founding FDE. Sometimes that is right. Often it is not, and everyone quietly knows it.
The honest question: Does your Founding FDE want to run people, capacity plans and hiring loops, or do they want to keep doing the work at the highest level? Both answers are good answers, but only if you have built a track for each.
Which is why career pathing cannot wait until hire ten. From roughly hire five, FDEs need to see two routes: a management track into leading the Function, and a senior IC track – Principal FDE, Field Architect, whatever you call it – where the job is the hardest deployments and the standards of everyone else’s. If the only way up is management, your best practitioners will get promoted into jobs they dislike or leave for companies that offer the IC route.
Compensation: Where FDE bands actually sit
FDE compensation causes more internal arguments than any other part of building the Function, because the role refuses to sit neatly in either the Engineering bands or the customer-facing ones.
Benchmark against your senior Engineering bands, not your customer success ones. Strong FDEs are strong Engineers who have chosen a harder-to-hire variant of the job, and they know what pure Engineering pays. Price them below it and you become the place FDEs leave.
On variable pay, be careful. A small component tied to implementation outcomes can work at the team level. Heavy individual variable comp pushes FDEs to rush go-lives, and a rushed go-live is how renewals die. Most companies that get this right keep FDE comp close to engineering-shaped: strong base, meaningful equity, modest variable if any.
And expect geography to complicate things, in a good way. FDE work is customer-facing but rarely office-bound, which widens your hiring map beyond your Engineering hubs – often the release valve when hires four to six get hard.
The Test at every Stage
From zero to ten, one question keeps the Function honest: could a new Customer tell which FDE they were assigned?
Early on, the answer is yes and that is fine – everything is bespoke. By hire ten, the answer should be no. Same playbook, same standards, same experience, delivered by people with room to grow on the track that suits them.
If you are somewhere between one and ten and the seams are showing, we spend most of our time inside exactly this build. Talk to Runtime before you make the next hire, not after it goes wrong.
Choosing the right recruitment agency is about fit, expertise, and trust.
By asking the right questions and digging into their processes, you can find a partner who not only fills roles – but helps you build a Product & Engineering team that fuels long-term SaaS growth.
Invest in a Product & Engineering Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.
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