Cursor’s forward-deployed engineers help enterprises scale agent adoption across the software lifecycle

Cursor’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, led by VP Pauline Brunet, works directly with enterprises to implement AI agents across the full software development lifecycle. Brunet describes the role as distinct from traditional customer support, emphasizing on-site, highly customized deployments that integrate with customers’ systems, workflows, and tools.

The FDE team’s mandate includes helping organizations move from individual AI adopters to organization-wide agent deployments. Brunet notes that adoption is often concentrated among early enthusiasts, and scaling requires leadership buy-in to standardize processes across teams. She highlights the need to identify internal champions who can drive transformation and collaborate with Cursor’s engineers to rework workflows.

Cursor frames these deployments as building an “AI software factory,” where long-running agents assist with planning, designing, writing, reviewing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software. Brunet contrasts this with siloed AI adoption, where different teams optimize their own tasks without cross-functional integration. The vision is to enable a single prompt—such as “Here is the feature I want to develop”—to trigger a coordinated agent workflow spanning the entire lifecycle, with feedback loops that refine future iterations.

The FDE team is expanding rapidly, with a stated goal to grow tenfold by December 2026. Brunet specifies that all current FDE hires are software engineers with at least five years of experience and prior customer-facing roles. She cites examples of hires from Spotify, Rippling, and Palantir, emphasizing their production system design and trade-off decision-making skills.

Customer deployments directly influence Cursor’s product roadmap, according to Brunet. The FDE team acts as a conduit between customers and Cursor’s engineering teams, translating enterprise use cases into product requirements and feature priorities. This feedback loop helps shape the direction of Cursor’s AI coding platform and agent capabilities.

Brunet also addresses the evolving role of forward-deployed engineers as agents become more autonomous. She expects the role to change significantly within six months, with a shift from proposing initial use cases to identifying new possibilities as the technology matures.