'Forward Deployed Engineer' (ab)uses tactical military terminology meaning an engineer at the customer site, who works with his team to do anything and everything to win the battle (make the customer happy), whatever the cost shall be. In some rare cases, these engineers really are deployed to combat zones (e.g. with US airborne or marines in Afghan). The problem is they end up with very smart people doing mundane tasks, such as installs and data cleansing, without any specialization and division of labor. Most FDEs are massively overqualified for the job they actually do.