Data & AI Weekly | Ep. 3 | FDEs vs. In-House Teams: Who Owns What?

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and the customer — but most organizations are still figuring out exactly where they belong and how they interact with in-house teams. As FDE teams become more common in infrastructure and data companies, the question of who owns what is getting harder to answer. In this episode, Redpanda CMO Melissa Czapiga sits down with a panel of founders and CTOs who've built, managed, and worked alongside FDE teams to unpack where forward deployed engineers add the most leverage, where in-house ownership is non-negotiable, and what it all means as AI agents enter the picture.