The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right

FDEs have the hottest job in AI. Labs, startups and PE firms are all hiring engineers to sit inside their customers’ operations and solve their problems. Almost none of them agree on what those engineers are supposed to accomplish, or what the strategy underneath the hiring actually is. I’m Vinoo, CEO of Kepler, the deterministic infrastructure for AI. I’ve built pieces of the forward deployed function three times, at three different institutions, over the course of over a decade. Here’s what I’ve seen work, what I’ve seen fail, and where I think this goes. The first was Palantir. I started there on product development, building storage and retrieval systems, and was later deployed as an FDE across commercial, DoD and NatSec, healthcare, and oil and gas. I also led Project Frontline, the rotation that took our software engineers and turned them into forward deployed engineers. Around 250 people went through this program, and a lot of them run forward deployed teams now at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Anduril. The second was Citadel, where I ran business engineering. Our customers were portfolio managers, and the only question that mattered was whether the data and software products we built helped…