Why I Moved to Forward Deployed Engineering from Developer Advocacy

This blog post is also available as video. Watch it here.

After a year and a half as a Developer Advocate, I recently joined the new Forward Deployed Engineering team being formed at Redis.

I’ve already made a video explaining what a Forward Deployed Engineer does [Link]. What I didn’t explain was why the role felt like the right next step for me.

My background was in backend engineering

Before moving into Developer Relations, I worked most of my career as a backend engineer, mostly in the JVM space with Kotlin and Java.

I worked as a software consultant and inside product companies. That experience covered startups, larger national companies, and multinationals. Most of my career involved building backend systems and solving engineering problems with other developers.

In 2022, I started sharing what I was learning online. I created my YouTube channel [Link] and published videos about the technologies I was exploring. Most of those videos were related to Redis.

I was learning in public. I would explore a problem, figure out how something worked, and then try to explain it in a way that could help another developer.

In 2023, I also started speaking at meetups and conferences. That eventually took me to Spring I/O in Barcelona and Devoxx Belgium in 2024.

By the end of that year, this work had led me to Redis, where I took my first role as a Developer Advocate.

What Developer Advocacy taught me

Developer Advocacy felt like an obvious next step at the time. I was already making videos, speaking at events, and sharing technical knowledge in my free time.

It was a valuable experience. In a year and a half, I delivered more than 35 sessions [Link], including conference talks and practical workshops. I recorded more than 10 videos for Redis, wrote articles, and spent a lot of time speaking with developers at conferences and meetups.

That work changed how I communicate. I became much better at explaining technical ideas, reading a room, presenting to different audiences, and feeling comfortable on stage.

I was doing well in the role. I got promoted, and my manager was happy with my work.

I still saw myself primarily as an engineer. Developer Advocacy was my job, but in my head, I was an engineer talking to other engineers.

I started missing production engineering

Over time, I started missing the engineering work I had left behind. I wanted to work directly with other engineers on real systems and deal with production problems involving scale, reliability, security, and performance.

My technical learning continued at Redis, though. When I joined, the company was moving toward a much stronger focus on AI. That gave me the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of LLMs, vector databases, retrieval, and agentic applications.

Redis encouraged me to study those subjects, experiment with them, and share what I learned at conferences and meetups. I gained a lot of technical knowledge during that period.

I wanted more experience building with those technologies in production.

Around December 2025, after about a year in Developer Advocacy, I started thinking seriously about moving back into engineering. I wasn’t completely sure yet, so my manager and I kept discussing it over the following months.

By the beginning of July, I was ready to make the move.

Finding the right kind of engineering role

The timing worked out well. A new Forward Deployed Engineering team was being formed inside Redis. The manager building the team heard that I was looking for a change and invited me to join. He’s now my direct manager.

I also interviewed with other companies in July, including for a traditional backend engineering position. The role involved working mostly with an immediate engineering team, picking up features, and delivering them. It felt like returning to the engineering cave.

That interview clarified what I wanted from my next role. I wanted engineering work that kept me close to customers and end users. I wanted to understand their problems, build with them, and see the impact of what we delivered.

Forward Deployed Engineering matched that description.

Why Forward Deployed Engineering fits

The role brings together the two main parts of my career.

I can work directly with customers, understand their applications and constraints, and help them reach production. I can also work inside their systems, write code, and solve problems involving architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance.

Presenting is also part of the work. I may walk a customer through a prototype or proof of concept, present an architecture design, explain our technical decisions, or show how a solution addresses their requirements.

Those conversations use many of the communication skills I developed as a Developer Advocate. I can apply those skills while doing the engineering work I had been missing.

The role also gives me another way to advocate for developers. After an engagement, I can bring customer feedback into Redis. I can show where people are struggling, where our technology is difficult to use, and where the product could do a better job.

That feedback can influence what we build next.

Forward Deployed Engineering gives me the balance I was looking for between Developer Advocacy and backend engineering.

What comes next

I’m only two weeks into the role, so there’s still a lot for me to learn.

I’m also reactivated my YouTube channel to sharethat process. I want to talk about what the job is actually like, what I learn from it, and how the role develops over time.

If that interests you, you can subscribe to my page. And as always, stay curious!