OpenFDE — the marketplace for Forward Deployed Engineers

Live: https://openfde.democra.ai · (also https://outpost-aib.pages.dev)

Forward-deployed engineers, on the ground in days.

OpenFDE is a professional, two-sided talent marketplace for Forward Deployed Engineers — the elite engineers who embed in a customer's business and ship production AI (RAG, agents, LLM systems) in weeks, not quarters. Companies search and find engineers directly on the page; engineers browse open roles. It is a product, not a report.

Built as a single static site — vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, zero dependencies, no build step — and deployed to Cloudflare Pages.

Features

• Search-first discovery — a working hero search plus a full filter rail: keyword, skills, seniority, engagement type, availability, max-rate slider, remote. Filters are OR-within-group / AND-across-groups, with live result counts and removable active-filter chips.
• Talent profiles — rich cards (avatar, availability, rate, skills, rating, location) open a focus-trapped, right-slide profile drawer with bio, notable deployments, skills, stack, and details.
• Two-sided — a Find talent / Find work toggle swaps the whole Browse view between engineer profiles and a job board, each with mode-appropriate filters and sorting. Mode persists in the URL (?mode=) and localStorage.
• Intake — a "Describe your need" form returns an instant, plausible shortlist count.
• Trust band, how-it-works, testimonial, FAQ accordion, two-sided footer.
• Responsive (sidebar collapses to a sheet on mobile, full-screen drawer), WCAG-minded (focus-visible rings, aria-pressed chips, focus-trapped dialog, Esc to close), prefers-reduced-motion.

Design system

Light, "enterprise-trust" aesthetic — Stripe/Linear precision with a recruiter's warmth. Fraunces (display serif) + Hanken Grotesk (UI), indigo-700 #4338CA on warm off-white #FAFAF7, flat 1px borders, soft layered shadows. See SPEC.md for the full spec.

Structure

File	Purpose
index.html	Page shell: nav, hero+search, Browse, drawer, intake, FAQ, footer
styles.css	Full design system (tokens, components, drawer, responsive)
app.js	State-driven search/filter/sort, drawers, mode toggle, intake, FAQ
data.js	Seed marketplace data — 22 engineer profiles + 11 open roles (window.OUTPOST_DATA)
SPEC.md	Design specification

All UI renders from OUTPOST_DATA; nothing is hard-coded in markup. Profiles are illustrative (generated seed data for a demo marketplace).

Run locally

python3 -m http.server 8847 --directory .
# or: npx serve .

Deploy (Cloudflare Pages)

export CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID=<account-id>
cfman wrangler --account claude-pages-deploy pages deploy . --project-name outpost --branch main --commit-dirty=true