I’ve been working as a Forward Deployed Engineer at an AI startup, embedded directly with customers. Last week I juggled 10 clients: parallel builds, Cloudflare outages, pre‑sales calls, and a 50/50 split between meetings and “real” building. This post is a blow‑by‑blow of that week: planning, context switching across Slack/Teams and internal tools, prompt‑tuning an insurance pipeline, firefighting when upstream infra breaks, and feeding patterns back into the product. It’s meant as the honest version of what this role actually looks like, not a recruiting brochure.