A Forward Solutions Engineer (FSE) at Protocol Labs develops, and deploys software to help data owners, storage providers, and builders use web3 infrastructure such as IPFS and Filecoin to solve real problems.
Outercore, the wider org that FSE belongs to, is how web3 systems and ecosystems scale. A FSE contributes to this mission by advocating for the proper use of technologies such as IPFS and Filecoin. They lower the barrier to entry by making significant contributions to estuary and singularity. They contribute good documentation, establish best practices and engage with the community via events, hackathons, forums etc. They hang around in filecoin slack and answer questions!
This is a versatile role that requires a diverse set of skills and interests.
At its core this is an engineering role requiring a high technical bar. FSEs should be able to decompose the technical component of a problem. They should be able to identify, deeply understand, and then fill technical gaps in a fairly autonomous way — this doesn’t necessarily mean they work in isolation, but they should be able to advocate for their cause effectively, and having a deep technical understanding helps with that.
FSEs need to be pragmatic. In the immediate term our goal is to on board as much data as possible to the filecoin network. There will be times when a quick workaround, or “duct-tapey” solution will unblock clients whilst we wait for the underlying problem to be fixed properly. A GTD (getting things done) attitude is crucial for this role.
FSEs should have high empathy towards their users to understand the pain points, as well as their colleagues within and outside outercore to efficiently effect change.
There will be a balance to be sought between doing a bespoke thing for a specific client and quickly onboard data, versus spending the time to understand the pain points and develop a more general solution (for example, improving estuary). That’s what makes this role challenging, yet highly impactful.
In the immediate term we will be focusing on increasing the onboarding rate of data to the filecoin network. This can take a few forms:
Working directly with a data owner and helping them onboard data.
Working with SPs to understand their onboarding processes, and potentially helping improve those.
Building/improving tooling like singularity and estuary.
Architecting and prototyping improved ways of onboarding data at scale.
Cake’s thoughts under the Q4 section in this post (https://common.art/@wwwjim/q3) are a good guide for the things a FSE should be thinking about.
If any of the above sounded interesting, we are hiring across the board. Do get in touch if any of those roles sound interesting (linkedin, twitter).