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Forward Deployed Engineering at Cursor — Pauline Brunet

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AI Engineer· published 2026-07-14· 0:20:47· en-US· indexed 2026-08-10 19:54

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51 shot(s).

keyframes kept every frame deduplicated

What was stored

cues
288
whisperx 288
chunks
37
from 288 cues
keyframes
11
kept of 51 captured
frames with text
11
116 lines read
chapters
11
from the source metadata
keyframe bytes
6.0 MB
word timings on 288 cues

Provenance

Each pipeline stage, its state and the model that produced it
stage state model started took
fetch done — 2026-08-10 17:52 1m 41s
stt done — 2026-08-10 17:54 23s
chunk done — 2026-08-10 17:54 0s
text_embed done — 2026-08-10 19:54 0s
keyframe done — 2026-08-10 17:54 2m 01s
ocr done — 2026-08-10 17:56 3s
frame_embed done — 2026-08-10 19:54 2s

Frames, and what the machine read

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Transcript

288 cues· 3,842 words· 20,985 chars

  1. 0:12 Hello, everyone.
  2. 0:13 Can you hear me okay?
  3. 0:15 Fantastic.
  4. 0:16 Are we having a great conference?
  5. 0:18 Everyone's excited?
  6. 0:19 Amazing.
  7. 0:21 I would love to introduce myself.
  8. 0:22 My name is Pauline Vernet.
  9. 0:23 I lead the forward deployment engineering team globally at Cursor.
  10. 0:27 I'm super excited to share some of the learnings that we've had as a company as we build out this function.
  11. 0:33 I have been doing AI deployments to enterprises for the last 10 years across consulting, and it's my third tech company, so I'm incredibly excited to share some of the learnings.
  12. 0:44 I encourage the discussions.
  13. 0:45 I'm incredibly passionate about the FTE function, and only 20 minutes to talk about it is not nearly enough, so please catch me after.
  14. 0:52 I'd love to chat with you about how we're thinking about this, what we've learned, and what we want to do going forward.
  15. 0:59 So a couple things about Cursor, we are an AI coding platform as you're well aware.
  16. 1:04 We have incredible products that we're offering as we're helping people go from autonomous coding to asynchronous and synchronous agents, all the way to an AI software factory.
  17. 1:16 I'm really gonna focus today on the forward deployed engineering function and I wanna share some of the learnings that we've had, so I'll really strictly focus on that, but always eager to talk to you about what we're doing at Cursor and what we're building.
  18. 1:28 So I always hear about FTE.
  19. 1:32 I'm waiting for the Forbes article that's gonna say, 2026 hottest job of the year is the FTE.
  20. 1:39 I feel like this is the year.
  21. 1:40 And I really wanna talk about it.
  22. 1:42 If you're thinking about building an FTE for your business, for your company, what I would personally recommend you do.
  23. 1:48 And the first thing is I want you to understand your customers or at least the target market that you're going after and where they are in their transformation journey.
  24. 1:58 And then I want you to understand your own product.
  25. 2:00 What are you offering to those folks?
  26. 2:02 How customizable is it?
  27. 2:05 And the reason for that is because I think of it on a matrix, right?
  28. 2:08 And a lot of people ask me, hey, is FTE like professional services?
  29. 2:12 Is it the same thing as staff augmentation?
  30. 2:14 What is FTE?
  31. 2:15 And I have some pretty strong opinions about where it fits and where it's not a great use of your 10x engineers to invest that time in for your customers.
  32. 2:24 So the first part is, think about your digital maturity of your customer.
  33. 2:28 How mature are they?
  34. 2:29 How technically advanced are they?
  35. 2:30 Where are they on their transformation?
  36. 2:32 And how can you actually help them for it?
  37. 2:35 The second part is the product customization.
  38. 2:37 Like how configurable is your product?
  39. 2:39 Is it SaaS straight out of the box?
  40. 2:41 You just sort of send a login?
  41. 2:43 Like for example, Teams, is it super easy to get set up and get running by yourself?
  42. 2:47 Or is it highly customizable, highly configurable for your customers?
  43. 2:51 And think about that on the metric.
  44. 2:54 So if you have a customer who is really maturing their digital transformation, they have engineers, it's a low customization on your project, I would really just say provide your product in a self-service fashion, give great documentation, probably not a great use of your FDE motion.
  45. 3:12 Same thing on your low maturity, low customization.
  46. 3:14 To me, this is like a traditional SaaS deployment, right?
  47. 3:17 Like I go in, deploy it, you can picture the waterfall project going through.
  48. 3:22 Not a great use of your FTE projects.
  49. 3:25 Then you have customers who are really, really mature and you have highly customizable products.
  50. 3:30 Here, you're gonna have crazy adoption, right?

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Introduction: forward deployed at Cursor
  2. 1:52 When NOT to send a forward deployed engineer
  3. 4:00 Where the forward deployed engineer fits
  4. 5:31 What the job actually entails
  5. 7:50 The economic buyer and a strict ROI
  6. 9:43 Scope discipline: knowing what you can't solve
  7. 11:22 Hiring unicorns by splitting the role
  8. 14:06 Who to hire, and being an honest partner
  9. 16:41 Six week engagements and scope
  10. 18:14 Pivoting on the learnings
  11. 19:55 Wrap up: build trust

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