Forward Deployed Engineers. What is the role, why is demand spiking, and who can perform in it?

A forward deployed engineer is a technical implementer embedded with a customer to configure a complex platform, build workflows/data models around real users, drive adoption, and keep the deployment healthy.

It’s a position adjacent to solutions engineering and professional services. They’re responsible for the architecture as it applies to the customer, and involves the same coding involved in traditional dev roles, data plumbing, access controls, enablement, and change management. Palantir popularised the title but the practice and what it entails predates it.

Where the term came from, and what the role does

About 15 years ago Palantir stuck a new badge on what was an already existing pattern – embed engineers directly with customers to configure the company’s platform (Foundry & Gotham, for Palantir) to their specific use cases, build workflows, data integrations, access models, and ship value on-site/alongside the users. They called this a Forward Deployed Software Engineer.

Their own material frames FDEs as implementers/architects who iterate with end-users, focus on configuring products, and handle stability/upgrade work. Quite distinct from a product SWE writing net-new features for many customers.

Those in industry cite strong overlap with sales/solutions engineering and professional services/implementation/technical consulting; that debate shows up repeatedly in practitioner threads on Reddit.

Day-to-day outputs

The Arguing Agile Podcast gives a great insight into what you’d typically see from someone performing this position – I’d highly recommend a listen if you are interested in what it entails. Responsibilities include:

• Embed with the customer’s users to configure an existing platform for one client’s outcomes (vs shipping net-new product features for many users)
• Scope the workflow with operators/stakeholders, then design, write, and test operational workflows in-platform
• Configure data models and handle stability/upgrade work alongside the build
• Implement access controls tailored to regulatory/compliance boundaries
• Keep meetings tight so hands-on build time stays high
• Own production, triage outages, find root cause, patch, monitor the stack, and coordinate comms across product, deployment, and the customer
• When a bespoke workflow proves useful to the client they’re embedded with, feed it back to the base platform so other deployments can use it

Forward-deployed engineers do this whilst on-site with a customer, often for several days per week for as long as the needs of the customer require/for as long as they’ve agreed with the provider at the time of engagement.

Why demand is rising now

Google Trends data shows a long, flat period for years, then a sharp global spike in searches for forward deployed engineer last month (August 2025).

The spike can likely be attributed to an announcement OpenAI’s international managing director, Oliver Jay, made at the Fortune Brainstorm AI 2025 conference in late July. There he announced the roll out of a new engineering role at OpenAI, one that was born out of a key bottleneck they had faced over the past year: Clients needing to bridge the gap from trial to production.

The announcement was made a couple of months after Colin Jarvis, Global Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI, announced on LinkedIn that he would be leading the firm’s new function.

Now, at the time of writing, OpenAI are hiring forward deployed engineers in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan.

But it’s not the OpenAI announcement alone that’s led to increased demand; there’s been a steady increase over the last year or so in discussion around the responsibilities of the FDE role on subreddits like r/cscareerquestions and r/salesengineers, as firms like Alphabet / Google DeepMind, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Databricks and Salesforce have all begun hiring for the position to address similar trial-to-production bottlenecks.

FDE vs SWE vs Solutions / Professional Services

What strong FDEs look like

Core technical:

• Data wrangling (SQL, connectors, basic Spark/ETL), RBAC/ABAC access models, API integration
• Workflow/orchestration inside a platform; light-to-medium Python/TypeScript for glue; dashboards that drive a process

Delivery skills:

• Requirements into workflows; change management; “ride-along” discovery; incident handling in production

Domain & ability:

• Sector literacy (defence, cyber, healthcare, industrial). For defence/aerospace, clearance pathways and export-control awareness are essential
• Customer-focused, strong communicators that are able to adapt to different problems and optimise their work for commercial impact

Who transitions well from adjacent disciplines

Those looking to move into a forward deployed engineer role could come from a variety of backgrounds:

• Solutions / Sales Engineers who want longer, post-sale ownership of an account
• Data/Platform Engineers who would enjoy moving more into the customer contact side
• Backend/Full-stack with strong systems sense, again a keenness for direct user engagement, and appetite for field work
• Product Engineers who are used to thinking and engineering with the end-users in mind and would like to transition to be more forward-facing

Thinking of a move into forward deployed engineering?

If you like shipping real capability with real users, enjoy real time feedback directly from source, and don’t always want to wait for product roadmaps, then forward-deployed engineering is the place where you can have your work land the same week you build it.

The role rewards engineers who can join the dots between data plumbing, access models, workflow design and adoption. Not many people can do all that, so they usually get higher pay, bigger responsibilities, and more face time with the bosses than a typical ‘just writing code’ job.

We’ll likely see many more FDE/FDSE openings over the next 12–24 months, and we’re already seeing demand trickle down to smaller startups as they become attune to the value of shortening that feedback loop between their customers and product/dev teams.

Platform companies (especially AI, data, identity and ERP) are under massive pressure to prove time-to-value. OpenAI publicly adding a forward-deployed track in late July sent a signal to buyers and competitors that staffed deployments will become the standard. We can expect companies to hire pods that look the same, and for regulated sectors (such as defence and health) to double down on on-site embedded builds.

Positioning yourself

If you are looking to move into an FDE role, the core things you need to be able to present are a clear outcomes story and credible proof you can turn a platform into day-to-day capability inside a real organisation. The goal is to prove you can turn a bought platform into working capability with real users. You don’t necessarily need an FDE title to do that. Reframe what you already have, perhaps a story where you discovered how a team actually works, shaped data and permissions to match, shipped something people used, and kept it operational and stable.

In order to be approached by recruitment teams you should adapt your profile for searchability. Forward-deployed, embedded with customers, time-to-value, adoption, incident response, these are all keywords we’ll be searching for when sourcing. And be explicit about on-site work and any clearance path you’ve got. If you can show that shape, you’re already credible for FDE even without the title.

For more information about routes into FDE and the benefits of a position in the field, get in touch with us today.