Graham Anderson

Dear Hiring Manager,

The gap between what AI can do and what most customers are actually experiencing is where I want to work, and that's exactly where a Forward Deployed Engineer lives. My background combines hands-on enterprise software engineering with over a decade of large-scale program leadership, letting me move fluidly between the IDE, the architecture whiteboard, and the executive briefing room.

At Accenture Federal Services, I partner directly with federal clients to modernize legacy systems, translating ambiguous business requirements into Java/Spring Boot microservice architectures and integrating them into existing enterprise infrastructure. I've enhanced CI/CD pipelines that reduced deployment time by 40%, implemented production-grade secrets management with HashiCorp Vault, and served as the feedback loop between client teams and internal engineering stakeholders, the kind of embedded, customer-facing engineering work that defines the FDE role.

Before pivoting into software engineering, I owned end-to-end delivery of $80M+ commercial and industrial programs. I built customer roadmaps, defended business cases to C-level sponsors, and coordinated across procurement, engineering, and field operations. That experience gave me a rare fluency: I can hold a deeply technical conversation in the morning and present a value narrative to an executive audience in the afternoon without losing anything in translation.

On the AI side, I actively build production-minded proofs-of-concept with LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). I stand up evaluation harnesses to measure prototype quality, and I track the evolving agentic landscape: multi-agent orchestration, agent-to-agent protocols, repeatable deployment patterns, so I can rapidly assemble bespoke, customer-specific demos that show tangible business value. These aren't side projects; they're the core craft I'm bringing to this role.

What draws me to forward-deployed work specifically is the speed and the stakes. The best FDEs don't just build features; they compress the distance between a customer's problem and a working solution. I've spent my career getting comfortable in that gap, and I'm ready to bring that energy to your team and your customers.

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background aligns with what you're building. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Graham Anderson