Forward Deployed Engineering

What is a Forward Deployed Engineer?

A software engineer who works where the problem lives. Pioneered by Palantir and now adopted by OpenAI and Anthropic, Forward Deployed Engineers embed with the customer, write production code inside their systems, and stay until it runs.

Consultants hand you a report. FDEs hand you a working system.

What an FDE actually does

Lives in your Slack, your standups and your customer calls, not in a ticket queue.

Maps the real workflow, the real data and the real systems before writing a line of code.

Writes production code inside your infrastructure: integrations, agents, evals, guardrails.

Owns the outcome: a metric agreed on day one, not billable hours.

Stays until it runs, then hands off with documentation, runbooks and training.

Why AI made FDEs necessary

Most AI never leaves the pilot. The model isn't the problem. The gap is everything around it: your data, your legacy systems, your security reviews, your customers' messy workflows. That gap is engineering work that has to happen on the ground. Forward Deployed Engineers were invented to close it.

FDE, consultant, staff augmentation

A consultancy

Delivers a report and a roadmap. The engineering work is still yours to do.

Staff augmentation

Delivers hours. Someone senior in your team, but nobody answers for the outcome.

A Forward Deployed Engineer

Delivers a working system inside your infrastructure, and answers for it running in production.

Why nearshore

Forward deployed means being there. A US FDE hire costs $215K+ and takes months. Our FDEs are based in Latin America, work full US business hours, speak C1+ English, and talk to your customers directly. A fraction of the cost, in your timezone.

How to hire one

Have an AI product and customers waiting on implementations: FDE for AI Companies, white-label.

Have an AI pilot stuck before production: AI Deployment Pod, one workflow live in 6–8 weeks.

Want to see it before committing: a two-week Deployment Sprint, fixed fee, full refund if it's not worth it.

Want an FDE inside your team, or your customers'? Book a Deployment Call.

Book a Deployment Call