Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers
Embedded consultants who get you up to speed on new tech in a hurry aren’t new, but they meet the AI moment
Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at the $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI, finds the term "forward-deployed engineer" (FDE) amusing. He explained to The Register that SHI has been employing FDEs for a long time, sending top consultants to clients without tying them to a specific project. Instead, FDEs receive a mission to build valuable solutions using new technology and have the freedom to do so quickly.
While cloud monitoring vendor DoIT has used FDEs since 2011, the term only became official in 2025 when DoIT renamed its "Customer Reliability Engineering" practice to FDE, aligning with the growing need for such engineering work to build AI proofs of concept. The concept of FDEs originated at Palantir, where CTO Shyam Sankar claims to have coined the term in 2007 after discussing French restaurants with Palantir's CEO Alex Karp.
Karp likened the excellent service of French restaurants to Palantir's engineers, who deeply understand the company's products and can provide value to customers. Sankar believes FDEs help customers understand Palantir's products and build value from them. Palantir's investors initially viewed FDEs as a cost burden, but Sankar argues that they are worth it due to the company's unmatched creativity, responsiveness, and focus on customer success.
AWS and Microsoft have also embraced FDEs, with AWS announcing a dedicated FDE organization and allocating $1 billion for it in June. Microsoft committed $2.5 billion to a "Frontier Company" that goes beyond FDEs in July. Both companies see FDEs as a means to help customers build AI applications. Despite the emergence of FDEs, vendors acknowledge that the concept isn't entirely new.
AWS' ML Solutions Lab, for example, functioned similarly to an FDE in 2017, providing data scientists to customers to build proof of concepts on AWS's platform. Analyst firms Gartner and Forrester support the use of FDEs, citing their effectiveness in accelerating adoption and turning complex platforms into production-ready outcomes.
However, both firms caution that FDEs may lead to clients becoming overly dependent on the vendor providing them.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
