How to Get a Forward Deployed Engineering Job Fast: The Exact Job Search Strategy That is Actually Working Right Now
This is a real-time breakdown of how one candidate in our program is generating a significant volume of interviews for forward deployed engineering and product manager roles in one of the most competitive markets in the history of technology.
- Not by sending more applications.
- Not by rewriting his resume for the hundredth time.
- Not by waiting for the perfect moment to put himself out there.
By doing something that 95 percent of candidates in this market are not doing and by doing it consistently, publicly, and without overthinking it.
Read this entire blog. We are scattering specific resources and resume templates throughout that you can access and use immediately.
This is an interview request from a recruiter from Salesforce for a forward deployed engineering role.
The Proof First — Because You Do Not Have to Take Our Word For It
He’s also in multiple final rounds with companies we’ve referred him to, as well as companies that have reached out to him. We’re not able to share any of the screenshots at this time.
Nevertheless, this is what consistent action looks like in the current market. Real interviews. Real companies. Real momentum.
Now let us break down exactly how he built it.
Part One: The LinkedIn Profile That Companies Are Actually Responding To
Ahdi's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ahdithanu
The first thing you notice when you look at his profile is that it looks like a professional who takes their public presence seriously.
Clean headshot, proper framing, a cover photo that signals environment and context rather than just filling a space.
These things matter because hiring teams form an impression before they read a single word of your experience.
But the photo is the least important thing on his profile.
He is a content contributor and a coach and not just a candidate.
Look at his current position section. In addition to his primary role, he lists himself as a content contributor and a coach. This does two things simultaneously.
It signals that he can create content which companies explicitly told us they value when they reached out to one of our candidates saying they noticed he was a mentor and a content creator who follows them on social media.
And it signals that he can communicate technical content live to a real audience which is the most direct demonstration of the customer-facing communication skill that every PM and FDE role requires.
His education is not why he is getting interviews.
Ahdi has a master's degree from Northwestern University and undergraduate experience at San Jose State. And before you decide that this is the reason he is getting interviews, we need to address something directly.
We receive consultation requests from Northwestern and Kellogg MBA graduates consistently. We do 40 to 70 consultations a week across all of our programs. Harvard MBA graduates reach out to us regularly.
Fun fact: 24 percent of Harvard MBA's class of 2024 was unable to find employment within the first 12 months of graduation.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/harvard-mba-employment-rate-job-hunt-difficulty-addfc3ec
The degree is not the differentiator. What Ahdi is doing with his time outside of his credentials is the differentiator.
59 certifications. The ones that actually matter right now.
Scroll down to his licenses and certifications section. He has 59 of them. Including Anthropic certifications from September 2026. Including the Claude Certified Architect Foundations. Including the certifications that signal to a hiring manager in three seconds that this candidate is not just familiar with AI tools — they have demonstrated competency with the specific tools the role requires.
He also has the Replit Agent connected to his profile under connected apps — which signals active development work rather than passive consumption.
94 skills including Fable 5.1 and ChatGPT Astra.
His skills section is not a list of evergreen buzzwords from 2019. It includes the specific tools that are generating the most hiring activity in the current market. Hiring managers who are looking for candidates who are current will see these skills and know immediately that this person is operating in the present rather than the past.
Part Two: The LinkedIn Activity That Is Actually Driving the Interviews
This is where Ahdi really shines. And it is the part of the strategy that most candidates are most resistant to executing — which is exactly why executing it produces such disproportionate results.
He is posting and reposting consistently. 10 to 35 reposts on an active day.
The LinkedIn algorithm, like every other algorithm, rewards consistency and frequency. The candidate who shows up every day — even if only to share content that already exists — is more visible than the candidate who posts the perfect original piece once a month.
Here is the insight that most people miss: you can always promote other people's content faster than you can create your own content.
Most candidates who try to build a LinkedIn presence get stuck in the content creation loop. What should I post? Is this the right angle? Does this make me look too promotional? And while they are having that internal debate, the role they wanted has already been filled by someone who just hit repost.
Ahdi is not overthinking it. He is posting and reposting content from companies he is genuinely interested in. He is following the organizations whose work he cares about and sharing their updates with his network.
And remember what one of the Salesforce recruiters told our community when they reached out proactively: we are reaching out because we see that you are a mentor and a content creator and you follow us on social media.
That is it. That is the entire mechanism. Follow the companies. Engage with their content. Show that you know what is happening in the market.
He is also reposting content from other thought leaders and creators in the space.
This is important and it is the move that most candidates are most afraid to make. They worry that promoting other people's content will make them look less impressive.
It does the opposite. It makes you look like someone who understands that there is more than enough opportunity to go around.
Companies want to hire team players. Sharing someone else's insight is one of the fastest and lowest-effort signals of team player mentality available on LinkedIn.
Part Three: The GitHub That Is Converting
Ahdi's GitHub: github.com/ahdithanu
https://github.com/ahdithanu?tab=overview&from=2026-08-01&to=2026-08-31
He has a GitHub. He has a professional photo on it. And he has connected his LinkedIn, his Medium account, and his personal website directly from his GitHub profile.
This matters because it turns his GitHub into a hub rather than an isolated repository. Every person who finds him through one platform has an immediate pathway to every other platform.
Look at what he has pinned.
His pinned projects are not generic tutorial recreations. They are projects solving problems that companies actually care about right now.
Earnings calls analysis. Companies care about earnings. Investors care about earnings. Anyone in a customer-facing technical role who can work with earnings data is immediately more interesting to a financial services or enterprise client.
Lead enrichment. Every company wants more leads. A portfolio project that demonstrates you understand how to build systems that support lead generation is one of the most commercially legible things you can show a hiring team.
The technical stack across his projects — HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python — covers exactly the skills that forward deployed engineering roles require across their breadth. He is not demonstrating depth in one narrow area. He is demonstrating the versatility that the three-hat model requires.
421 contributions this year. Most of them since August 2026.
He has 44 commits and 7 repositories. The contribution graph shows that the majority of his activity has been concentrated in the last two months.
This is not a candidate who has been building for years.
This is a candidate who decided to start moving and then actually moved.
The green dots on the GitHub contribution graph are proof of velocity and companies read them as exactly that.
He is not telling hiring teams he can move fast.
He is showing them a timestamp-verified record of how fast he has actually moved.
Part Four: The Portfolio Website That Actually Makes Sense
Ahdi's website: uaconsulting.co
Most portfolio websites are an extension of your resume. They show the same positions, the same dates, the same bullet points that the hiring team already read on LinkedIn. They are redundant artifacts that consume the candidate's time to build and provide no additional signal to the evaluator.
Ahdi's website is different because it is not about him. It is about the problem his clients are trying to solve.
Most firms can not see how their clients expand. We build the analysis that shows you.
That opening line is not a personal bio. It is a value proposition for a specific audience with a specific problem. And the framework underpinning it comes directly from one of the most important business growth frameworks ever articulated.
Jay Abraham identified three ways to grow any business: increase the number of clients, increase the average transaction value, and increase the frequency of transactions. Ahdi's website speaks directly to the expansion revenue problem — the question of why companies spend so much time chasing new customers when their existing customers are already willing to buy more.
This is the kind of commercially grounded thinking that a hiring manager at a forward deployed engineering company wants to see. Not a list of projects. A demonstration of business judgment.
Part Five: Medium — Distribution That Most Candidates Skip Entirely
Ahdi's Medium: ahdithanuthayakumar.medium.com
Most people hear they need a portfolio website and they build one. Almost nobody hears they need to get that portfolio onto every other platform and then actually does it.
Ahdi has a Medium blog. At the time of writing he has one follower and is following one person. This is important to acknowledge because it means the results he is generating are not coming from an established audience. They are coming from the activity itself — from the consistency of showing up across multiple platforms rather than the size of any single audience.
Distribution is 90 percent of the game. The best restaurant in the world does not matter if nobody is eating at it. The best song in the world does not matter if nobody is listening to it. A portfolio website with no traffic is a portfolio that does not exist in the market's memory.
Medium is a platform with its own search traffic and its own reader base. Publishing there means your work has a chance of being discovered by people who are not already looking for you. That discovery compounds over time in a way that a private portfolio site never can.
And AI agents — which we teach in our program — can help automate the distribution process in ways that make maintaining a multi-platform presence sustainable even for someone working a full-time job simultaneously.
Part Six: Two YouTube Channels — The Differentiator That Changes Everything
Most candidates we work with resist starting even one YouTube channel. Ahdi has two.
Channel One: youtube.com/@ShippedbyAhdi
Channel Two: youtube.com/@AhdithanU/videos
Here is why this matters more than almost anything else on this list.
Every role in the PM and FDE ecosystem requires the candidate to communicate technical concepts to non-technical audiences under real-time pressure in front of real people. The interview is a test of that capability. But words in an interview are forgettable. Video is evidence.
When a hiring manager watches a candidate explain a technical concept on YouTube before the interview, they arrive at the interview already partially convinced. They are not starting from neutral. They are starting from a foundation of demonstrated capability.
YouTube video is the highest-signal portfolio artifact available to a PM or FDE candidate right now. It is searchable. It is shareable. It is timestamped evidence of your communication ability that exists independently of anything you say in an interview room.
Ahdi is also hosting a podcast on YouTube.
This signals something specific to hiring teams that most candidates underestimate. Hosting a podcast requires you to recruit guests, prepare questions, facilitate a conversation in real time, and manage a production process. These are exactly the skills that a PM or FDE exercises when running a client engagement. The podcast is not just content — it is a live demonstration of the project management and communication capability the role requires.
He is hosting hackathons for the latest tools.
Hosting a live hackathon for GPT-6 Astra is not a passive consumption activity. It is proof that he understands a tool well enough to teach it to other people in real time. That is a higher bar than knowing how to use a tool. That is the bar of a forward deployed engineer.
He is also hosting live training sessions.
Part Seven: The Move That Nobody Expected — Viral Content
instagram.com/reel/Ddrrbc-KCNr
Ahdi helped us produce a viral short based on a trending format when we did not have time to produce it ourselves. He volunteered. He executed. He posted it.
This is the framework we have borrowed from Adley Kinsman and that Jean Kang has articulated better than anyone we have encountered: entertain the masses, educate the interested, sell to the committed.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dc2k3K4t7hB/
Creators out there that make the most amount of money, if you look at their content, they’re not selling anything. No one wants to be sold to. If you look like an ad, it’ll ick.
Look at what the big brands are doing. They’re starting micro-dramas. They’re doing Barbie, House of Guinness. They’re disguising. They’re education in entertainment.
So our thesis is: entertain the masses, educate the interested, sell to the committed. And you will never have to worry about money another day in your life.
But you have to entertain, because that is why they’re on the app. They’re not on there to learn about your real estate deal or your coaching opportunity. They’re on there to be entertained, to distract themselves, to kill time. So you have to understand how to meet them there and how to disguise what you want them to learn. And then if you entertain them first, you can earn the right to educate them on whatever you want.
Jean Kang put it this way in a post that we want you to go read directly:
instagram.com/advicewithjean
instagram.com/p/DdmH5_8yj_y
The most important professional skill right now is not coding. Fortune published the numbers: Netflix is paying up to $1.2 million for a communications director. Anthropic lists strategic communications roles at $400,000. OpenAI is paying $430,000 plus equity. The role is strategic storyteller. Because AI can now build the product. What it still cannot do is make people care about it.
In tech, I spent about 10 years at places like LinkedIn and Figma, driving influence without authority. My job was never about shipping features; it was about making people understand why those features mattered. So I took those skills and my ability to translate complex ideas and built this multiple six-figure business as a strategic storyteller.
Jean Kang spent a decade at LinkedIn and Figma driving influence without authority. Her job was never about shipping features — it was about making people understand why those features mattered. She turned that skill into a multiple six-figure creator business.
This is the skill that a16z has been writing about for years when they argue that the product spec is no longer the most important artifact. The story is.
https://a16z.com/product-management-is-still-all-about-telling-stories/
If you think storytelling is not part of the PM or FDE job, debate us in the Discord.
We will not fight back — because we do not need to. The salary data makes the argument for us.
Part Eight: The Community Behavior That Seals the Deal
Discord: discord.gg/V59WzjzrGp
Here is the thing about Ahdi that might be the most impressive part of everything we have covered.
He is actively sharing everything he is discovering in real time with the entire TechCareers community in our Discord.
While most candidates who find success in a competitive market instinctively protect what they have learned, Ahdi is doing the opposite. He is posting what is working. Sharing what he is seeing. Contributing to other people's job searches while he is still in the middle of his own.
This is not just admirable behavior. It is a direct signal to any hiring manager who observes it that this candidate is capable of the client-facing generosity and collaborative orientation that makes a forward deployed engineer successful in a customer environment.
An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. When we find something that helps, we share it. That is what this community is built on.
Part Nine: Networking, Networking, Networking
Networking is so important, and unfortunately most people working in tech aren't doing anything about it.
Champs, 35% of forward deployed engineering postings are now physically based in New York City, according to this article by Paraform on how to get a forward deployed engineering job with OpenAI.
https://www.paraform.com/insights/openai-forward-deployed-engineer
We can’t tell you how many times we were able to secure interviews and placements for forward deployed engineering and product manager positions, among other roles, through networking events, for candidates who were rejected from the application or interview process.
Forget getting a job for a second. Right now, most business is being conducted practically in person, so if you're not showing up, you're simply missing out.
The Honest Analysis: Why Ahdi Is Actually Winning
Let us bring it all together with the real reason behind everything above.
He executes without asking why.
Most candidates receive a playbook and then want to have a conversation about whether the playbook is right. They need more context. They need a script. They need to understand the reasoning before they are willing to move. By the time they have finished analyzing the playbook, the role is gone and the candidate who just started executing is three weeks into their portfolio.
Ahdi received the same guidance everyone else in our program receives. He did not debate it. He did not ask for a rationale. He started doing it — and he did it with a smile.
He is comfortable being uncomfortable.
Putting yourself out there publicly — on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Medium, in a Discord full of peers — is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable for everyone. The candidates who claim it is not are either not doing it or not being honest about how it feels.
The signal that discomfort communicates to a hiring team is significant. They are hiring for a role where every day involves doing things that are difficult, ambiguous, and sometimes unpleasant in front of clients who are paying for results. A candidate who has publicly demonstrated the ability to do uncomfortable things anyway is a fundamentally different hire than one who has only done things that felt safe.
In a market where procrastination is costing the economy billions every year, the candidate who acts is the anomaly. Be the anomaly.
He understands distribution.
The best product in the world does not matter if nobody uses it. The best candidate in the market does not matter if nobody knows they exist. Ahdi is not just building things. He is getting them in front of people. He understands that the portfolio, the GitHub, the Medium blog, the YouTube channel, and the Discord presence are all individual channels in a distribution system that compounds over time.
This is exactly the thinking that the best PM and FDE candidates demonstrate — and it is exactly the thinking that earns them the offers.
He is data-driven.
Every piece of content he puts out generates engagement data. What resonated. What was shared. What prompted a follow. He is reading that data and adjusting. This is the same analytical orientation that drives the best product decisions and the best client engagements. He is practicing it daily without calling it practice.
He is doing it for the long haul.
Companies are explicitly looking for mission-driven candidates who will stay. The candidate who has been consistently showing up on LinkedIn and YouTube and GitHub for two months — even just two months — is already more credible on the consistency dimension than the candidate who says they are committed but has nothing to show for it.
What You Do With This Information Right Now
Do not try to do everything at once. You will overwhelm yourself and execute nothing. Here is the sequence that produces momentum without burnout.
Action Step 1 — Join the Discord today.
This costs nothing and takes three minutes. The community is active. The resources are there. The trainings are happening daily. You will not find a better free resource for PM and FDE career transition support anywhere in the market.
discord.gg/V59WzjzrGp
Action Step 2 — Schedule a strategy session this week.
If you are serious about making this transition before the year ends — and you have eight to ten real working weeks before the market slows in December — book the call. We will tell you honestly where your background is strong, where the gaps are, and what the fastest realistic path looks like from where you are starting right now.
Forward Deployed Engineering: consultation.techcareers.io/o-discover-fde/about
AI Product Management: consultation.techcareers.io/o-ai-pm/about
Marketing Engineering: consultation.techcareers.io/marketing-engineer-o/survey
Action Step 3 — Set up the infrastructure. One platform per day.
Day one: Create your GitHub account. Upload one project. It does not have to be impressive. It has to exist.
Day two: Create your Medium account. Write one post. 300 words. Something you actually know about.
Day three: Create your YouTube channel. Film one video. One minute long. Your phone camera is sufficient.
Day four: Update your LinkedIn. New headshot if the current one is more than two years old. Add your certifications. Update your skills section with current tools.
Day five: Create your portfolio website. Use Lovable if you do not know how to build one. The goal is a live URL with a value proposition — not a resume extension.
Action Step 4 — Start reposting on LinkedIn today.
Pick three companies you are genuinely interested in. Follow them. Find a post they made this week. Repost it with one sentence of genuine commentary. Do this every day. It takes five minutes. The compounding effect over 30 days is significant.
Action Step 5 — Get your CCAF certification.
We run preparation sessions every Tuesday and Thursday at 1PM Pacific and 4PM Eastern. If you are targeting any of the roles in our program — FDE, AI PM, or Marketing Engineering — the CCAF is the single fastest credential improvement available to you right now. Start there.
The Final Word
Ahdi has one follower on GitHub. He has two YouTube channels with small audiences. He started most of this in August 2026.
And he is generating interviews at a rate that most candidates with ten years of experience and degrees from elite universities cannot match.
Not because he is more talented than them. Because he started. Because he kept going. Because he understood that in a market this fast, showing is worth ten times more than saying.
Go connect with Ahdi on LinkedIn — be intentional and strategic about it because he is going to get a lot of requests from people who read this blog. And then come into the Discord and tell us what you need. We will build the resources around the community's specific gaps.
We got you.