# Forward deployed engineering: role and offer assessment

Original Ryuc worksheet, prepared 31 October 2026. This is an editorial tool, not a compensation survey.

## Define the actual role

- Employer, location, level and posting URL:
- Posting checked on:
- Main deliverable I would own:
- Customer discovery responsibilities:
- Production code, deployment and incident responsibilities:
- Who owns the system after handover:
- Expected travel, office attendance, customer time zones and on-call:
- How reusable platform work is recognized:

## Compare compensation on the same basis

- Fixed annual cash and currency:
- Target variable cash and payout conditions:
- One-time payments and repayment conditions:
- Equity instrument, total grant, vesting, cliff and liquidity:
- Employer contributions and benefits included in CTC:
- Relevant comparator with the same location, level and scope:
- Unknowns to clarify before accepting:

Do not treat a multi-year equity grant as annual cash, or convert an overseas salary into a local benchmark without adjusting the comparison.

## Assess one engineering project

- User task, baseline and agreed acceptance criteria:
- Authenticated actor and tenant boundary:
- Authoritative data and document freshness:
- Read tools, write tools and exact approval requirements:
- Durable workflow state and retry/reconciliation behavior:
- Evaluation cases, including failures and unauthorized requests:
- Quality, latency, cost and adoption measurements:
- Rollback and operating handover:
- What I personally built versus what I observed:

## Questions for the employer

1. What will a successful first quarter produce?
2. How much work is engineering, configuration, discovery and support at each delivery stage?
3. How are customer deadlines reconciled with security and quality requirements?
4. What determines whether a customer need becomes a shared product feature?
5. Who approves scope changes and owns production incidents after launch?

## Career decision

My strongest evidence today:

One gap to address with a concrete project:

One adjacent role that uses the same transferable skills:

Decision and next review date: