FDE Resume and Portfolio: 5 Customer-Style Projects That Get Interviews

A forward deployed engineer is hired for judgement as much as code. So your portfolio should look like customer work: a clear user, a real problem, a measured result and honest limits. Here are five projects, a README template and resume examples.

What hiring teams want to see

• A specific user and problem, not "a chatbot"
• Messy data handled well
• A deployed service, not only a notebook
• Numbers: accuracy, time saved, cost per request
• Honest failure analysis
• Clear writing and a short demo

Five project ideas

1. Support email triage assistant

Story: a small company gets 500 support emails a day and wants them sorted and drafted. Build: read emails, label the type, retrieve answers from a help-centre document set (RAG), draft a reply with a person approving it. Show: accuracy on 100 labelled emails, the cases it gets wrong, and time saved per email.

2. Messy data integration pipeline

Story: a retailer exports orders from three systems in different formats. Build: pull from a CSV, an API and a spreadsheet, clean and merge them, store in Postgres, add data-quality checks and a small dashboard. Show: rules for duplicates, handling of bad rows, and a log of what was rejected and why.

3. Document intake and extraction

Story: a finance team types invoice details by hand. Build: extract fields from PDFs into structured data, validate them with rules, and send low-confidence items to a review screen. Show: field-level accuracy, and how the review step lowers risk.

4. Natural-language analytics with guardrails

Story: managers want answers from a sales database without writing SQL. Build: convert questions to SQL for a read-only schema, check queries before running, and show the SQL used. Show: an eval with 50 questions, and examples where it refuses or fails safely.

5. A deployment you can operate

Story: your best project deserves production habits. Build: container, environment-based secrets, logging, health check, cost tracking per request and a short runbook. Show: what you would check first if it broke at 2 a.m.

A README template that shows judgement

1. Problem and user (three sentences)
2. What I built and a diagram
3. Decisions and trade-offs, including what I left out
4. Results with numbers and a short demo video
5. Failures and what I would improve
6. How to run it in five commands

Resume bullets: before and after

• Weak: "Built a chatbot using LangChain."
• Strong: "Built a support-triage assistant that labels emails and drafts replies from a help-centre corpus; reached 87% label accuracy on 100 held-out emails and cut average handling time in testing by 40%."

The numbers in the example are only to show the style. Do not copy them. Use your own real, measured results, and if you do not have users yet, say it was tested on a public or self-created dataset.

Where to put the work

Host it on GitHub (see GitHub profile and portfolio guide) and link two or three projects at the top of your resume. Use the fresher resume guide or the experienced engineer resume guide, and check it with the ATS checklist.

Show your communication

Write one short blog post or post a five-minute demo video. For an FDE role, clear explanation is evidence of the job itself.

Next steps

• Follow the FDE roadmap
• Practise with the FDE interview guide
• More ideas in portfolio projects that get interviews