A Forward Deployed Engineering team is a senior engineering pod that lives inside your stack and ships production systems against your business outcomes. The model was proven at Palantir and is now standard at OpenAI, Anthropic, and the AI labs. FDE Team brings it to enterprises that need outcomes faster than they can hire.
A senior engineer who works inside the customer's environment — their codebase, their data, their security perimeter — and is accountable for shipping the system, not just delivering hours. The role combines product, engineering, and customer-facing work in one seat.
They scope the use case, build the system, integrate it with the customer's tools, deploy it, write the evals, train the team, and operate it until handoff. The deliverable is a running system, not a deck.
Hiring senior engineers takes 6–12 months and a fully-loaded $400k+ per seat. A Forward Deployed Engineering team is on your code in days, ships in weeks, and disengages cleanly when the work is done.
A senior engineer embedded in the customer's environment who owns delivery of a deployed system end-to-end.
Scope, build, integrate, deploy, evaluate, and operate the system — accountable for outcomes, not hours.
Contractors deliver hours. FDEs deliver systems. The accountability shape is different from day one.
Yes. Engagements run from a single pod for a fixed scope to multi-pod platforms for enterprise rollouts.
A senior pod in your stack within days. Production AI in weeks.