The FDE Conference III

Rochelle Mattern leads field engineering at Together AI, running the pre-sales and post-sales technical team embedded in Together's largest customers. Her team owns technical outcomes across the full customer base and serves as the voice of the customer to Together's product, engineering, and research teams. She also works directly as a technical advisor to several key accounts, focused on the reliability and performance of production AI workloads at scale.

Jetashree Ravi leads part of the Applied ML Engineering team at Fireworks AI, where she focuses on making inference fast, reliable, and production-ready. She works across the stack, from improving deployment performance and reliability under load to helping customers fine-tune and launch models. When a workload is slow, unstable, or not behaving as expected, she works with teams to diagnose the issue and build a scalable solution.

Jove Zhong is Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Cresta, a $100M ARR enterprise AI company building the AI operating system for customer experience. In less than a year, he scaled Cresta's FDE organization from 2 to more than 50 people across seven countries, earning recognition as FDE Team of the Year at Propel 26. He brings 20+ years of enterprise software experience from IBM, EMC, and Splunk, co-founded Timeplus, and shares practical FDE leadership lessons through his newsletter and video podcast, Forward Deployed Caffeine.

Santosh Iyer is an Operating Advisor and EVP at Insight Partners, a global software and AI investment firm with more than $100B in AUM, 600+ active investments, and 55+ IPO exits. He supports due diligence on new investments and works closely with the founders, CEOs, and CROs of Insight’s portfolio companies to drive profitable growth at scale.

Santosh founded and co-leads Insight’s Forward Deployed Practice, which helps portfolio companies decide whether a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) motion fits their business model and, if it does, supports building the strategy, growth thesis, and operating model to run it. The practice is anchored by the FDE Advisory Council, the industry’s first council dedicated to FDE, whose founding members include senior leaders from Databricks, ServiceNow, Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce.

He brings 25+ years of global experience in revenue leadership and operating roles at AI, ML, Data, and BI companies, and as a consulting leader at PwC and Infosys Consulting. He holds a BS in Engineering and an MBA, and is based in Silicon Valley.

Jannik Wiedenhaupt is a Forward Deployed Engineer at Poetic. He has spent years enabling companies to reap the benefits of AI, both as a founder of an AI startup and as an AI engineer at McKinsey & Company.

Sanjog Gururaj is a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Weave, where he helps enterprise engineering leaders measure how AI is changing the way their teams ship software. He was previously a consultant at Deloitte and a software engineer at NASA.

Adi Sairamachandran is a Forward Deployed Engineer at Google. He previously served as Head of FDE at Judgment Labs and as the founding FDE at Vapi. Across those roles, he has owned complex enterprise AI deployments end to end, managed pre- and post-sales technical relationships across $4.5M+ in ARR, and helped scale FDE organizations through hiring, onboarding, mentorship, and deployment playbooks. His work sits at the intersection of engineering, enterprise sales, and customer delivery, turning ambiguous customer problems into production systems that create measurable business value.

Het Trivedi is a Forward Deployed Engineer at Scaled Cognition, where he works on AI for customer experience. He was previously a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, helping companies deploy and scale AI models in production.

Raghu Subramanian is a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at FurtherAI, which is reimagining insurance with AI workflows. He works directly on evals and agent adoption, and brings a background in ML systems and optimization from UT Austin. He previously worked at Sprinklr and Bain. Fun fact: he drinks more Diet Coke than water.