Forward Deployed
Engineers.

A senior engineer embedded in your business who takes a problem from first conversation to production: own discovery, own spec, own deploy, responsible after launch. Unlike a contractor: no PM translating, no team to hand off to.

They sit in your standups, read your data, and talk to your users, then build. A typical week means scoping one business problem, shipping it, watching how it behaves in production, and fixing what it does wrong. AI agents write most of the code volume. The engineer decides what to build, reviews every line before merge, and puts evals and guardrails around anything customers touch.

Palantir. They put the name on the role around 2020, describing engineers who deploy to the customer's site rather than working from headquarters. The term spread once AI could carry the volume of the work, leaving one role to remove the waiting between roles. US job boards now list thousands of openings using the title.

Staff augmentation gives you hands for a defined ticket queue. You still supply the product manager, the project manager and the DevOps. A forward deployed engineer replaces all four. You hand over a business problem instead of a backlog. Fewer people in the loop, fewer meetings, and one name that owns the outcome.

Judgment and accountability. AI agents produce code volume fast, and produce plausible-looking wrong answers just as fast. Our engineers average 11 years of experience and most have been a CTO or a founder, so they know what production looks like when it breaks. They review the output, wrap it in evals and guardrails, and carry the pager. That part is not included in vibe coding.

We interview and test 15 to 18 engineers for each placement to be sure about one, and you meet the shortlist and make the final call. The first conversation happens within a day or two. Most engagements are running inside two weeks and ship a first release in the first sprint.

You are comparing it against four salaries, not one. We quote a monthly rate per engineer: no recruiter fee, no bench cost, no notice period. We give you a number on the first call once we know the shape of the work. We don't publish a rate card because scope moves it too much.

Yes, within the boundary of one product. A forward deployed engineer replaces the route a task takes: owner speaks, engineer ships. That only works if the old route is switched off inside that perimeter. The rest of your organisation is not touched. Without that change an FDE becomes a regular developer, only more expensive, so we say this upfront.

Then the bottleneck is not engineering, and one engineer will not fix it. If your feature waits on five departmental approvals by policy, it will wait in the same queues no matter who builds it. We check this on the first call. If that is your situation, we say we cannot help rather than sell you an FDE.

You tell us and we replace them from the same bench, at no cost. NDA and IP transfer are in place from day one. And if we think your problem doesn't need a forward deployed engineer, we tell you that on the first call instead of selling you one.