From X to FDE

Three backgrounds tend to transition well into the FDE role: software engineers, consultants, and product managers. Software engineers already have the technical foundation but often need to develop the ability to communicate AI tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders and build a portfolio that shows they can own a full deployment, not just write code. Consultants and PMs can already translate data into business outcomes, which is half the job, but need to close the gap on engineering by building real agents, RAG pipelines, and eval frameworks from scratch.