One of our clients said this about one of our developers:
“To live and breathe the project as much as Karol does is extraordinary, and I don’t get that kind of engagement even from my in-house team.”
That kind of engagement has a name now: the forward-deployed engineer. The video above is the full version. This is the written one, for skimming and for sending to whoever is hiring.
What Our Best Projects Had in Common
People. Over a decade and more than a hundred clients, the projects that went best were always built around exceptional individuals, and across different teams those people had a lot in common. They worked closely with the business, delivered at a pace we hadn’t seen before, and what they shipped was useful and just worked.
This way of working was always natural to me. I’ve been that person since early in my career. But it was only a few years ago that I realized our best work was with people who shared that mindset. That’s why it’s great working alongside them, why clients love them, and why their contribution to the business beats anyone else’s. It’s what our client saw in Karol.
FDE vs. Consultant vs. Senior Developer
The difference is who owns the problem. A consultant tells you what to do, and leaves. A developer usually works from a list of tickets. An FDE stays, takes the problem, and ships the solution.
Where the Term Comes From
Palantir pioneered the role. Early on, it started sending engineers to work directly with its customers, many of them in government and defense.
The name fits. In the military, forward-deployed means stationed near the action, not back home. Today that doesn’t have to mean on-site. It means being close to the problem, wherever you sit. Plenty of FDE roles are remote, with customer visits when they matter.
Over the last year or two, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic picked up the idea, and FDE became one of the hottest job titles in tech.
Why It Matters More at a Smaller Company
Large companies can staff every piece of the process: the roles on payroll, the time for meetings, the budget for discovery. Smaller companies, and small units inside big ones, never have enough of everything. They still have to understand the problem, decide what to do about it, and make it work, in software and across the organization. An FDE covers those gaps. The closest comparison I have is an engineer with an entrepreneurial mindset.
With AI, a small team of the right people now takes on work that used to need a much bigger one. On one of our recent projects, a case management platform for a county’s youth-services team, we went from the first commit to a product ready for review in seven weeks. Our estimate for the same scope, built the way we used to build: at least three months, with a team at least twice the size.
One honest caveat: AI doesn’t make every engineer faster. In METR’s 2025 randomized trial, experienced open-source developers took 19% longer on tasks in their own mature codebases when they used early-2025 AI tools. The gains we see come on new builds, run in a disciplined loop, by the right people. The tool amplifies the engineer. It doesn’t replace one.
The Four Traits of a Great FDE
I think of it as four lanes: they know their craft, they get the business, they communicate well, and they deliver.
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They know their craft. Palantir hires new graduates into the role. But at a smaller company, with no support around them, an FDE has to be senior. They bring a wider view of which tools to use, how to design the solution, and what worked before and what didn’t. They also know the crafts next to their own: a little product, data, analytics, business, maybe even sales. That breadth is what lets most decisions happen in one meeting, instead of a long email thread with ten people on it.
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They get the business. They’re given problems to solve, not lists of tasks. Many start as regular team members and earn their place in stakeholder discussions over time. They don’t wait to be handed the information. When context is missing, they ask for it themselves: what’s the goal, what’s the impact, what are the constraints.
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They communicate well. Talking to the business goes far beyond a discovery phase about requirements. The best ones are comfortable in a sales discussion, on a client call, in a support conversation or in a board meeting. Those are very different rooms, and it takes skill to be at home in all of them.
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They deliver. They figure out what needs to be done, plan it, build it and ship it. They don’t have to do it alone, so the role often carries some authority and leadership. And they know software isn’t judged by its diagrams. It’s judged by what users think of it, how they use it, and whether it gets the job done.
Where This Is Going
I think the best people, working with AI, will deliver more than whole mediocre teams, and the truly best FDEs will change what a company can take on. Job postings for the role are already going up. In my opinion, whether we call it FDE or not, this trend will only grow.
The Takeaway
You can’t write this role into a job description, but you can see it in how someone works. Give them a problem instead of a task, and see what comes back: questions about the goal, the users and the constraints, or a list of tickets.