What is a Forward Deployed Engineer, Anyway?
Demystifying the hype and impact of the FDE, at Palantir and beyond.
In this first installment on Forward Deployed Engineering, we explore what the FDE role really is and why it's caught on in the world of software. In future posts, we will dive into how we define and hire for the role and what separates a truly differentiated Forward Deployed Engineering function.
Two decades have passed since the nascent startup Palantir Technologies coined the job title “Forward Deployed Engineer” to describe a unique mix of best-in-breed software engineer, product expert and strategist that was needed to solve the real-world challenges of data integration at the most critical organizations in the world.
At the time, the terminology could only have come from Palantir, reflecting their distinctive blend of a Silicon Valley approach with a government and defense focus. Recently, however, the "FDE" has caught on beyond the defense tech ecosystem, especially as Palantir has demonstrated exceptional commercial success and other companies scramble to replicate the results.
Today, open positions for Forward Deployed Engineers have proliferated to companies as diverse as Snowflake, MongoDB, Rippling and even OpenAI. Meanwhile, many companies small and large that provide professional services to Palantir customers call their consultants FDEs by default (present company included).
So what is an FDE? Is it just a rebrand of a familiar role like a customer success engineer or an IT consultant, or something fundamentally different? We argue that to merit the unique title, an FDE should be much more than either of these or any other more standard roles.
While individual Forward Deployed Engineers can wear many hats, there are a few key elements that consistently distinguish the role: FDEs are laser focused on delivering outcomes against valuable problems, they partner closely with their customers to immerse themselves in the problem space, they are builders rather than consultants, they leverage product to maximize and scale results, and for software companies like Palantir they are the primary R&D muscle for ensuring the right product is built.
1. Outcome Delivery Specialists
One (if not the) key driver of Palantir's success is that, from day one, their engineers have focused not simply on developing and selling software, but on doing so in order to deliver valuable outcomes for their customers.
“Delivering outcomes” might sound like an obvious goal, but the reality is that it is very different as a primary objective compared to selling software subscriptions or selling billable hours. Even twenty years into Palantir's business, this business model remains unorthodox if not outright unintelligible to many, including both buyers and sellers of software and services.
This focus on outcomes is so uncommon for a software company that Palantir confounded outside analysts for many years. Because they always framed their software in service of "mission" rather than the features that an IT org could buy, many analysts assumed they must be an unusually successful services company masquerading as a software company. At worst, these outsiders assumed that the software must be nothing more than smoke and mirrors held up by an unsustainable army of tech consultants.
In any case, a key pillar of Forward Deployed Engineering is to maintain a singular focus on overcoming all challenges on the way to solving for an outcome, whether technical or non-technical. The key then lies in how the FDE does this.
2. Problem-Solving at the Front Lines
Forward Deployed Engineers do share some DNA with the more familiar versions of consultants and contractors. One of these parallels is that an FDE is willing, able, and even insistent on spending plenty of time embedded with their customers in order to fully comprehend the problem space, the data, and how the organization works.
This might be common practice at management consulting firms, but it’s far from typical for a software product company. Palantir's view from the outset was that the biggest problems can't be understood from the safe and comfortable bubble of Silicon Valley office space and require true immersion in all the complexities of the real world. When it comes to the most valuable and complex problems, the embedded partnership is rocket-fuel accelerant to success.
This principle encompasses the "Forward Deployed" part of the job title, and it’s worth noting that the bit of military flair wasn’t just to sound cool: Palantir's early employees were often embedding at forward operating bases, ships, and similar frontline locations. Even outside the military context, on any given day an FDE might find themselves working from a post-hurricane disaster zone, the frontlines of a pandemic, or the dry docks of a shipyard to tackle hard problems wherever they’re found.
3. Builders, not Consultants
FDEs might be mistaken for strategy consultants because they embed themselves with key stakeholders, navigate ambiguity around a thorny problem, and look for solutions. Or they might be lumped in with IT consultants because they work with tech teams to engineer data pipelines and build applications to solve business problems. Neither of these representations are necessarily inaccurate, but they are both incomplete.
Compared to a typical consultant, the FDE does not simply come up with a strategy and present it. Instead, they take responsibility for breaking down strategies into concrete goals, prioritizing and implementing the necessary steps to achieve the objectives, and course correcting whenever an obstacle or new signal arises.
Compared to an IT or data science consultant, the FDE doesn't simply take direction based on a pre-defined roadmap, connecting to data sources and writing ETL pipelines. Nor do they spend all their time diving into data to build an impressive algorithm or machine-learning model they can hand over. Rather, the FDE takes on the full responsibility for building an accurate, end-to-end representation of a problem or business area and iterating on every aspect of the work with the key stakeholders.
Nor, by the way, is the FDE just a particularly brainy or technically capable consultant. Hiring the best and brightest does help for various reasons (which we’ll discuss in the future), but the role encompasses a mindset, approach and a way of operating much more than it describes a particular GPA or CV.
Some of the FDE’s work is non-technical, and some of it is highly technical. No matter what, they should be able to navigate the challenges that arise and deliver a solution that provides real, tangible value at the end of the day. If the outcome-focus is the “what”, the end-to-end hands-on delivery of the solution is the “how.”
4. Product Leverage Maximizers
A commonality between an FDE and a post-sales engineer or a specialized consultant for other SaaS companies is that they are experts in the particular software product being used: think of Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, or any other number of software providers whose customers often rely on external product experts to get set up and keep things working at scale.
In Palantir's case, understanding the software inside and out and seeing various implementations over time becomes a key driver of the FDE's effectiveness. The FDE must be able to quickly understand how to wield the software platform to draw lines from where a customer is today to where they want to be in the future. They need to be a pattern-matching machine, ensuring the full capabilities of the platform are brought to bear from day one.
The product therefore can be seen as a force multiplier on top of the efforts of the FDE. Without a core product, even the most brilliant builders would deliver outputs that scale only by adding more hours towards custom development or stitching together various partial solutions. But with an end-to-end product providing the right toolkit, even a small team can deliver a scalable solution to an ambitious problem in a matter of days or weeks.
Palantir has proven that this model works at scale. Growing via traditional services would see them scaling revenue according to billable hours (essentially, linearly increasing time and effort as customer count and license revenue increases). Instead, thanks to increasing product leverage from Foundry, Gotham, Apollo and AIP, they've been able to keep headcount steady while increasing customer count and revenue per FDE.
5. Embedded R&D
The final key role of the FDE is specific to software companies, and it is critical to understanding Palantir's success.
Because the FDEs are out on the front lines working to deliver high-stakes outcomes, they are highly credible as the eyes and ears of the product team. They necessarily operate at the frontier of the product: they know what their customer needs today and become acutely aware of any complexities or limitations of the software that might delay or endanger their ability to deliver against those needs. When gaps are observed, their goal is not just to find a temporary workaround but to feed the signal back to the core product teams directly.
This feedback loop and the product team's responsiveness in turn helps not just the one customer, but all future customers as well. This process continues as the company grows and the product becomes more capable, with the frontier simply pushed outward over time.
This iterative style of software development and constant reprioritization based on the urgency and importance of outcomes at stake eventually creates a high level of product maturity, in turn offering the FDE greater product leverage and feeding a virtuous cycle. In Palantir's case, there would likely have been no way to build such a complex product, let alone maintain their differentiation compared to competitor products over time, without a full commitment to this process. Other software companies should take note.
Value Creators, Product Experts, Engineers
While it's tempting to write off the Forward Deployed Engineer role as mere marketing, the reality is that it does describe a particular, and rather innovative, role. FDEs continue to proliferate today because they provide unique value both to customers that hire them and software or services companies that employ them. The flipside, however, is that finding or developing a team of truly effective FDEs can be exceedingly difficult. Putting out a job posting alone is not enough to find the right human for the job. In subsequent posts, we'll dig deeper into what makes a successful Forward Deployed Engineer and how we approach the problem of building the best team of FDEs possible.
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With 100+ years of combined experience, Fourth Age is a leading Palantir partner focused on delivering value with Foundry and AIP. We provide a full range of services to ensure our partners can maximize the value of their strategic software investments, including strategic consulting, end-to-end use case delivery and long-term enablement. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you unlock the potential within your organization’s data, reach out to us via our website.