Forward Deployed Engineer: Profession of the Future

When everyone can build anything, knowing what to build is everything.

In recent years, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) has emerged as more than just another enterprise software role – it represents the future of how technical talent will be deployed in an AI-driven world. As development tools become more powerful and accessible through AI and automation, the critical challenge is shifting from writing code to orchestrating complete solutions that solve real business problems. The future of technical work lies not with traditional software engineers focused purely on implementation, but with FDEs who can bridge the gap between increasingly powerful but generic tools and specific business needs. Similar to a startup CTO or CEO, these engineers must own end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects, embedding directly with customers to serve as the essential connective tissue between technology and real-world impact – from architecting solutions and writing code to engaging with customer executives and developing team strategy. While Palantir popularized the term and established many foundational principles, the role has evolved beyond its original implementation into a broader mandate. As AI automates routine development tasks and platforms democratize basic engineering work for software and hardware, the most valuable commodity becomes problem knowledge. The highest-value technical roles will increasingly require the unique combination of technical excellence, business acumen, and customer obsession that defines the FDE and companies that recognize and embrace this shift early will have a decisive advantage in attracting and deploying technical talent in the AI era.

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The Palantir Legacy: Starting A Movement

At its core, Forward Deployed Engineering emerged from a fundamental insight about enterprise software that went far beyond traditional professional services and sales engineering approaches. Before Palantir, enterprise software deployment typically followed a rigid separation of concerns: sales engineers would scope technical requirements and demonstrate product capabilities during the sales process, professional services teams would manage implementations and business processes, and system integrators would handle technical connections between systems. This fragmented approach often led to solutions that looked good in PowerPoint but failed to deliver real value, with each team optimizing for their narrow slice of the problem rather than the customer's actual needs.

As Ted Mabrey (Palantir's head of commercial) explains, the FDE role was inspired by how excellent French restaurants operate: the waitstaff is an intrinsic part of the kitchen, empowered to tell customers "no" if they're ordering the wrong wine with fish. Just as high-end restaurants own the responsibility of delivering the best possible experience, Palantir recognized that enterprise software needed engineers who would take ownership of customer outcomes, even when customers didn't know how to ask for what they needed. This meant breaking down the traditional barriers between sales, implementation, and engineering – creating a new type of role that could understand customer needs deeply enough to shape both the immediate solution and the long-term product roadmap. Their “Delta” software engineers were essentially technical consultants with coding abilities, embedded directly with customers to customize and deploy their early platform and develop new features. The Palantir model established a high bar for technical excellence, with a focus on hiring young, exceptional engineers from top-tier universities who could solve complex technical problems. As enterprise technology has evolved over the past 2 decades, companies have begun developing different approaches to FDE that emphasize various combinations of technical and business skills, leading to today's diverse landscape of FDE roles. As Ted has often said, it is notoriously difficult to implement a good FDE program. Most copycats and practitioners miss the form rather than the function and end up mired in conflicts with product/eng teams long term.

The role particularly shines in situations where standard professional services or system integration approaches fall short – when deep product customization, real-time problem solving, and technical innovation are required to meet customer needs. It's especially powerful with cutting-edge tech, giving Fortune 500s access to Silicon Valley-caliber talent they could never hire directly – something traditional consultants simply can't match. FDEs often work alongside professional services teams and system integrators, providing the crucial technical bridge between custom requirements and product capabilities. Where it starts to differ from standard sales engineering/solution architecture is in the core philosophy: trial and error applied to product development in real time with customers and making strategic bets on the right outcomes is the real way to win long term.

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The Three Philosophies of Forward Deployed Engineering

The FDE role has evolved to support both software and hardware implementations, with each domain presenting unique challenges and opportunities. Whether deploying cloud software or implementing embedded hardware solutions, the core principles remain similar while the technical specifics vary. Today, we see three distinct approaches:

1. The Deep Technical Specialist Model

This is closest to the original Palantir approach, where FDEs are primarily senior engineers who can architect and implement solutions on-site. The focus is on technical excellence and deep platform knowledge.

2. The Hybrid Consultant/Post Sales Model

This newer approach emphasizes a balance between technical skills and consulting capabilities. FDEs in this model are expected to understand business processes, manage stakeholder relationships, and implement technical solutions. They often take ownership of the entire integration lifecycle, from initial scoping through to production deployment, working closely with professional services teams to ensure successful delivery.

3. The Pre-Sales Technical Leader Model

This approach positions FDEs as technical sales leaders who combine traditional sales engineering expertise with hands-on implementation capabilities. These FDEs are deeply involved in the pre-sales process, creating technical proposals, running proof-of-concepts/prototypes, and architecting solutions, but also remain engaged through implementation to ensure the proposed vision becomes reality. They excel at both technical storytelling and practical execution, often working alongside sales engineers to demonstrate value early while ensuring long-term customer success.

While these models represent distinct approaches, it's important to note that a single company can and often does employ all three philosophies simultaneously. It's very reasonable to have pre-sales FDEs focused on capture, post-sales FDEs handling implementation work with mature products, and deep technical specialists working on newer products. Palantir demonstrated this successfully, running all three types side by side. The specific mix depends on the stage of progress, with FDE personas potentially shifting between these roles based on the needs of the company at that time. As Tushar Narayan at Vannevar Labs points out, this kind of evolution may happen over multiple distinct phases as a company grows. This flexibility proves invaluable as organizations evolve - during my time at Primer, I experienced the unique challenges and opportunities of each role firsthand through different projects and opportunities. What makes these transitions particularly enriching is the exposure to domain experts. There's something incredible about getting to sit with intelligence analysts, defense researchers, and operators who've dedicated decades to their craft. In six months working alongside these teams, you can absorb knowledge that would take years to learn in a traditional setting. It's like getting a PhD in your customer's business, except the deadlines are real and the stakes actually matter. You learn to decode specialized language, spot patterns in complex workflows, and translate deep domain expertise into technical requirements - skills that stay valuable no matter where your career takes you.

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Bridging Software and Hardware Domains

While Forward Deployed Engineering originated in software companies, its principles have proven valuable across both software and hardware domains. In software, FDEs focus on tasks like API integrations, custom feature development, and cloud infrastructure optimization. The role has also evolved to support hardware deployments, where rapid iteration and customer feedback are especially critical due to the high costs and long lead times of hardware development. Having FDEs in the field allows companies to quickly identify integration challenges, adjust designs based on real-world usage, and develop solutions for edge cases before they become expensive manufacturing problems. These FDEs tackle challenges in areas like edge computing, hardware-software interfaces, and embedded systems customization, serving as a crucial feedback loop between customer deployments and core product development.

A prime example is Gecko Robotics, where FDEs play a crucial role in adapting their robotic inspection and analysis platforms to new industrial use cases. Their FDEs must deeply understand both the robotics platform and various industrial environments to identify repeatable patterns and opportunities for automation across different inspection scenarios. This requires a unique blend of hardware knowledge, software expertise, and industry-specific understanding. Other companies like Rapid Robotics follow similar patterns, but just have a different breed of "mechanical engineer" internally to address this need. The model requires significant financial investment though - as Barry McCardel of Hex rightly states, you're essentially treating customer deployments as R&D rather than COGS, with individual deployments potentially having terrible margins. This tradeoff becomes especially stark in capital-intensive industries. Take hypersonic aircraft and missile manufacturing: while having empathetic engineering talent deeply embedded with customers is crucial for understanding complex requirements and aerospace domain specifics, running multiple concurrent design iterations with different customers could be financially devastating given the high CAPEX involved. Without thoughtful implementation, the FDE model has its limitations and may not be suitable for all companies or industries, particularly in consumer sectors and deeply complex technology where it might do more harm than good.

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Core Pillars and Customer Immersion in Modern FDE

Successful FDE programs are built on several fundamental pillars, with deep customer obsession at their heart. The key elements that define a modern FDE include:

1. Deep Customer Understanding Through Immersion

In traditional software development, engineers typically work from their office, receiving requirements through product managers and rarely, if ever, interacting directly with customers. This disconnect often leads to misaligned solutions and missed opportunities. Modern FDEs don't just gather requirements – they embed themselves in the customer's world. Whether it's spending time on a factory floor, in an operations center, or at a field site, this immersion provides insights that traditional customer interaction models miss. The most successful FDEs can understand not just what customers say they want, but what they actually need based on firsthand experience with their workflows and challenges. Of course, raw work ethic is table stakes - the role demands not just immersion but the stamina and determination to see complex ideas through to completion, often in the face of unexpected challenges and shifting requirements.

2. Rapid Prototyping Capabilities

The ability to quickly create working prototypes or proof-of-concepts is crucial. This doesn't always mean writing production-ready code, but demonstrating potential solutions quickly and iterating based on direct customer feedback. This rapid iteration cycle is particularly powerful when combined with deep customer understanding, allowing FDEs to quickly validate or adjust their approaches.

3. Technical Breadth Over Depth

While deep technical expertise in specific areas is valuable, modern FDEs need to understand a broad range of technologies to effectively solve customer problems. Think of an FDE as a technical Swiss Army knife - they might need to write Python code to automate data processing, configure cloud infrastructure on AWS, design REST APIs for system integration, optimize database queries for performance, and set up monitoring dashboards all in the same week. This breadth is crucial because enterprise problems rarely stay in one technical lane. The most effective FDEs can seamlessly move between different technical domains, understanding enough about each to connect the dots and architect solutions that work within a customer's existing technology landscape. This includes proficiency with common enterprise integration patterns, API design, data transformation, and various middleware solutions that often form the backbone of enterprise implementations.

4. Stakeholder Management and Business Process Understanding

The ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders is crucial. In practice, this means an FDE might start their morning presenting ROI metrics to C-level executives, spend lunch whiteboarding technical architecture with the IT team, and end the day training frontline workers on new workflows. They need to speak multiple "languages" fluently - from technical jargon with engineers to business metrics with executives to practical how-tos with end users. They must grasp not just how the technology works, but how the business itself operates - whether that's understanding a manufacturer's supply chain, a bank's risk assessment process, or a retailer's inventory management. This versatility becomes especially critical when driving organizational change and ensuring new solutions actually get adopted rather than gathering dust.

5. High Integrity and Earnestness About Customer Domain

The creation of dedicated FDE roles fundamentally changes how engineers engage with customer domains. By embedding engineers directly with customers and making domain understanding a core part of their mandate, the FDE model creates organizational space for genuine curiosity to flourish. This structure naturally attracts and retains people who are energized by diving deep into customer problems, whether in defense, manufacturing, or healthcare. The role's emphasis on customer immersion means FDEs have both the time and organizational support to truly understand industry terminology, regulatory requirements, and operational nuances. This isn't just individual initiative – it's systematically encouraged through the role's design, making it easier to identify, hire, and develop engineers who thrive on connecting technical solutions with real-world domain challenges. By making domain expertise a fundamental responsibility rather than an optional add-on, the FDE model adds inherent integrity to the role – success requires not just technical delivery but genuine mastery of the customer's world. The resulting insights and trust built through this structured approach often surface opportunities that traditional engineering roles, constrained by conventional boundaries between technical and domain expertise, might miss entirely.

Consider Peregrine's approach to public safety technology. Their founders spent intentional time physically embedded with police departments, developing deep operational knowledge of law enforcement challenges. While product managers across tech routinely conduct user research and gather requirements, what emerged at Peregrine went beyond traditional PM practices. Their sustained field presence and iterative development alongside officers exemplifies the blurred line between product discovery and engineering that characterizes the most effective field teams. The distinction becomes clear in the outcomes: PM-driven products tend to solve well-defined, pre-scoped problems, while FDE-built solutions often expand into unexpected areas as engineers discover and tackle adjacent challenges through sustained customer partnership.

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The Evolving FDE Job Market

The job market reflects this evolution in FDE roles and will likely continue to change. Take Ramp's recent job posting for Forward Deployed Engineers: while they require solid engineering skills, the listing emphasizes capabilities like "problem-solving technical hurdles facing strategic accounts," "driving product and engineering roadmaps," and "understanding the full range of integration capabilities" - a notable shift from traditional engineering requirements. This mirrors a broader trend across industries, where job descriptions increasingly highlight:

• Strong communication and presentation skills

• Experience with rapid prototyping and proof-of-concept development

• Business process understanding

• Stakeholder management experience

• Broad technical knowledge rather than deep expertise in specific technologies

This shift represents a growing understanding that the most effective FDEs aren't necessarily the strongest pure engineers (although definitely desirable), but rather those who can effectively bridge the gap between technical capabilities and business needs. At Palantir, for instance, some of their most successful FDEs came from physics and mathematics backgrounds rather than traditional computer science - they excelled not because they were the strongest coders, but because they could rapidly understand complex customer domains like energy trading or aerospace manufacturing. This skillset is incredibly important and businesses are slowly waking up to the fact that it is a necessary part of building technology companies into the future. Hiring for these positions is incredibly hard because applicants with the relevant combination of technical depth, taste, dynamism, and entrepreneurism are in short supply. As the applicant pool catches up, there is an opportunity for people with non-traditional backgrounds inside and outside of engineering to have outsized impact in these roles. Traditional software engineering applicants can do well in these roles - their technical foundation provides a strong basis for learning the business and consulting skills needed to succeed. However, the role ultimately demands a broader skillset that goes beyond pure engineering expertise.

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Looking Forward

The incoming wave of AI and automation isn't making the Forward Deployed Engineer obsolete - it's making them indispensable. As development tools become more powerful and accessible, the critical challenge shifts from building individual components to orchestrating complete solutions that actually solve business problems. This democratization of technology is creating a paradox: when everyone can build anything, knowing what to build becomes everything. The FDE's deep understanding of customer needs and system integration becomes more valuable, not less. They're the ones who ensure AI agents actually serve business goals, automated processes truly improve efficiency, and shiny new tools solve real problems. Natalie Meurer of Sierra AI, for example, talks about how building AI agents requires not just technical skills but deep domain expertise and customer understanding - the same core competencies that have long defined successful FDEs.

The transformation extends beyond just development tools. FDEs increasingly operate in an ecosystem where AI streamlines their entire workflow: JIRA tickets get automatically prioritized and routed, Git commits generate their own documentation, Slack threads get summarized across time zones, and project dependencies surface themselves before becoming bottlenecks. This automation of routine coordination means FDEs can orchestrate larger, more complex projects while staying focused on the critical human elements - building trust, understanding unstated needs, and driving real business transformation.

The FDE's evolving toolkit includes:

• Generative AI and low-code platforms that accelerate prototyping

• Automated development tools that handle routine coding tasks

• Smart project management systems that streamline coordination

• AI-powered documentation and communication tools

• Democratized hardware platforms that enable rapid physical prototyping

• Cloud services that provide powerful building blocks

The core value of FDEs remains unchanged, but their leverage is multiplying. In a world where anyone can prompt an AI or deploy a microservice, the FDE's ability to understand the bigger picture - from business strategy to system architecture - becomes the real differentiator. The role isn't about becoming an AI specialist or mastering every new tool; it's about being a technical generalist who can harness an increasingly powerful and automated toolkit to turn possibilities into business realities. Today's FDE moves faster and operates at a larger scale than ever before, as automation handles the routine aspects of development and coordination. This frees them to focus on what truly drives successful implementations: understanding and adapting to customer needs, architecting holistic solutions, and ensuring technology delivers real business value.

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Conclusion

Forward Deployed Engineering has evolved far beyond its Palantir origins, proving that great enterprise technology comes from combining technical excellence with deep customer understanding. The role has become more crucial than ever, as technology becomes more powerful but the challenge of applying it effectively only grows.

For organizations: The FDE model represents a fundamentally different approach to building and deploying technology - one that prioritizes customer outcomes over technical elegance alone. While it's not right for every company, those who succeed with it gain a powerful advantage: people who can bridge technical and business domains, deeply understand customer needs, and deliver solutions that actually matter. Whether through formal FDE programs or by embedding these principles in your culture, building this capability is becoming increasingly vital.

For students and early-career engineers: If you're drawn to both the technical and human sides of technology, the FDE path offers a unique opportunity. You'll learn to build solutions that matter while developing broad skills that span engineering, business, and leadership. Consider seeking internships or roles that put you close to customers and real-world problems.

If any of this resonates and you think you fit the mold, please reach out and I’m happy to connect you with exciting companies looking for the next generation of FDEs!