How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Ramp — Leo Mehr
Jul 28, 2026 · 14:05
Leo Mehr, Director of Engineering at Ramp, lays out two principles for Forward Deployed Engineering: always be scoping and scale with tokens. He illustrates scoping with a Friday night SAP S4 HANA integration request that required pausing to validate urgency, and a painful lesson where his team built an Android reimbursement feature only to learn the customer mandated iOS devices. For scaling with tokens, Ramp automated the request intake stage with a Notion agent that saved about 20% of scoping time by asking iterative questions and generating specs. Mehr warns that without proper scoping, agents become a 'token maxing slop cannon,' while without agent automation, competitors will overtake you. He concludes that the future of FDE requires both human judgment for scoping and agents for volume.
