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Mark F.

Mark Faraj. Forward Deployed
Engineer.

Product engineering, web platforms, and applied AI.

Currently at ▲.

Writing

All writing

Jun 25, 2026 · 8 min read · 4 readers

What a Forward Deployed Engineer actually does

“Help us migrate this application to ISR” sounds like an implementation request. Find the right Next.js configuration, change a few routes, verify the cache behavior, and move on. That was the request from a large enterprise software company I worked with. It was also an incomplete description of the problem. Once we got into the application, the work spread across caching, revalidation,…

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May 28, 2026 · 23 readers

Not everything needs to be an agent

The default answer to a software problem is increasingly an agent. A user describes a goal. The model decides what to do, calls a tool, looks at the result, and decides again. That loop is a real architecture. For some work it is the right one. Often it is autonomy dropped onto a sequence that was already known. I have a rule I use before I reach for an agent. Do not start by asking how many…

Apr 16, 2026 · 3 readers

Performance Problems Are Architecture Showing Up as Timing

A page is slow. The first instinct is to look for something you can optimize. Reduce the JavaScript bundle. Memoize a component. Add a cache. Rewrite a query. Those are the changes that look like performance work in a pull request, and they are sometimes the right ones. They are also a reliable way to spend time making the system slightly faster at doing work it did not need to do. The…

Jul 30, 2026 · 4 readers

What Shipping iOS Exposed in My Web Code

Paw Social ran in the simulator for weeks. Feed, onboarding, the meetups map, realtime chat. Then I asked the pipeline for a build that could exist on a phone I was holding, and it refused. The React had not changed. The code the simulator was happily running was the same code the build was rejecting, which meant the problem lived in a layer I had never needed to look at: the gap between my…

Areas of work

  • Product engineering

    From ambiguous requirements to production systems: scoping, implementation, and the last mile of shipping.

  • Applied AI

    Agent workflows, tool use, evaluation, and production integration — when models help, and when they do not.

  • Web architecture

    Next.js, rendering, performance, and application architecture for sites that have to stay fast as they grow.

  • Engineering strategy

    Migration paths, technical tradeoffs, and incremental modernization without stopping product work.