Leo Mehr defines forward-deployed engineering at Ramp as product engineering focused on making core and agentic features work for large enterprise customers. He organizes the practice around two principles: always scope the real problem before building, and continually adapt the job so models and agents handle more of the execution pipeline.
Leo Mehr illustrates scoping with two costly failure modes. An urgent integration request may reflect internal sales pressure rather than a customer's actual deadline, while an apparently straightforward mobile feature can waste weeks if the team never verifies which platform the customer uses. Forward-deployed engineers therefore ask who needs the feature, what drives the urgency, whether a workaround exists and whether other customers would benefit before committing engineering effort.
Leo Mehr describes scaling with tokens as applying agents to context gathering, request clarification, specification writing and implementation. An internal request agent asks multiple rounds of questions until a proposal is ready for a specification, while future work targets the harder middle stages between intake and shipped product. Evals, rubrics, human feedback and reliable access to product context become central, but forward-deployed engineers retain responsibility for taste and judgment over the final result.
Watch on YouTube
