Forward Deployed Engineering
Become an engineer who ships in production — the program a former Head of Engineering used to train his own team.
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the program a former Head of Engineering built to train the kind of hire he was tired of not being able to find: someone who can walk into a real codebase, ship a feature end-to-end, own its production behaviour, and talk to the customer about it. It is intentionally different from a bootcamp — you spend most of your time in a real repo, not a slide deck. A note on the name: we teach the original discipline the term comes from — production engineering under senior mentorship, in the sense Palantir used it. AI companies have recently reused “Forward Deployed Engineer” for LLM/RAG/agent-deployment roles; that is a different job and we do not teach it here.
Accountability your family can see
Unlike most institutes, Rest Coder Academy gives guardians a live view of a student's progress, scores and attendance — every week. You always know exactly how the learning is going, so nobody is left guessing.
See how it works for parents →Who this course is for
- Recent CS/IT graduates who can write basic code but have never shipped anything a stranger uses.
- Working engineers 0–3 years in who feel they got hired but never actually got trained.
- Career switchers with a strong technical background (data, QA, DevOps, analyst) who want to move into product engineering.
Prerequisites
You should be comfortable writing basic programs in at least one language (Python, JavaScript or Java) and be OK with the command line. You do not need prior React, cloud, or DevOps experience — the program teaches those from scratch. What we can't teach in eight weeks: the habit of showing up. FDE is a full-time commitment.
What you'll master
- Engineer's foundations — Git, PRs, code review
- Full-stack build — React/Next.js, APIs, Postgres
- Ship it — AWS/Cloudflare, staging vs prod, IaC
- CI/CD & testing — pipelines, gated deploys
- Real integrations — payments, webhooks, APIs
- AI-assisted engineering
- Production ownership — monitoring, data integrity
- Capstone — build & deploy a real product
What you can do after this course
- Ship a full-stack application to production — real domain, real users, real payments.
- Own a CI/CD pipeline: pull request → automated tests → gated staging → production, without a senior babysitting the deploy.
- Debug live: read logs, trace a request through a distributed system, and roll back safely when something breaks.
- Design and implement REST APIs that other engineers can actually consume, with authentication, rate limits, and useful error responses.
- Wire real integrations: payment gateways, webhooks, third-party APIs — the parts of engineering that tutorials skip.
- Talk about your work like a product engineer, not a coder — trade-offs, cost, risk, timeline.
Projects you’ll ship
- A production SaaS with paid customers. You build a real product — pick your problem, we help you scope it — with authentication, payments, a working admin panel, and observability. It runs on your own domain by week six and ships publicly at graduation.
- A gated CI/CD pipeline. GitHub Actions running your unit + integration tests, previewing every PR, deploying to staging on merge, and promoting to production only after a smoke check passes. You configure it from empty repo to green production deploy.
- A third-party integration end-to-end. One real integration — Razorpay/Stripe checkout, Twilio SMS, a webhook consumer, a scraping pipeline — built defensively: retries, idempotency, dead-letter handling. Not a happy-path demo.
Career paths this course opens
- Forward Deployed Engineer at product startups
- Full-Stack Engineer at SaaS companies
- Solutions Engineer / Implementation Engineer
- Product Engineer at early-stage startups
- Software Development Engineer (SDE-I / SDE-II) at scale-ups
Placement support is real, not a promise — see named graduates and the companies they joined on our Placements page.
Frequently asked questions
- How is Forward Deployed Engineering different from a normal full-stack bootcamp?
- A bootcamp teaches you a stack. FDE teaches you the job around the stack — reading someone else's code, shipping to production, handling incidents, owning integrations, talking to non-engineers about technical trade-offs. You still learn the stack (React/Next.js, APIs, Postgres, cloud), but you spend more time in real repos and production tooling than any bootcamp we know of.
- Do I need to be a strong programmer already?
- You need to be comfortable writing basic programs in one language and using the command line. You do not need React, cloud, or DevOps experience. If you have never written code in your life, start with our Java or Python full-stack course first.
- What is the fee, and is EMI available?
- The FDE program is ₹50,000. EMI plans are available at no interest through our partner — we walk you through it during enrolment.
- Do you guarantee a job at the end?
- No, and be cautious of anyone who does. We guarantee that you will ship real production software, that you will be interview-ready, and that we will actively work our network to open doors for you. What we cannot guarantee is that you show up every day — that part is on you.
- Is the program in-person or online? What are the timings?
- Our default cohort is in-person in Jayanagar, Bengaluru, weekdays, full-time. We occasionally run a part-time evening cohort for working engineers — check the Next batch line at the top of this page for the current dates and mode.
- Who teaches FDE?
- Nikshep Kulli, formerly Head of Engineering, who built this program from the training material he used with his own team. His profile with credentials and links is on this page and on the Placements page.
Ready to join Forward Deployed Engineering?
₹50,000 · EMI available · placement support · live, project-based cohort in Bengaluru.