Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers

Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at SHI, a $16 billion global solutions integrator, finds the IT industry's use of the term "forward-deployed engineer" (FDE) amusing. He explains that SHI has been employing this approach for a long time, sending top consultants to clients without tying them to specific projects. Instead, consultants receive a mission to build something valuable using new technology, with freedom to make it happen quickly.

The concept of FDEs is not entirely new, as cloud monitoring vendor DoIT has been using them since 2011, and merely started using the term in late 2025. The term originated at Palantir, where chief technology officer Shyam Sankar claims to have coined it in 2007 after discussing French restaurants with CEO Alex Karp. Sankar explains that Karp compared wait staff to kitchen staff, who intimately understand the food and methodology, not merely serving the food.

Sankar adopted this idea for engineering, creating FDEs who embed with customers to ensure Palantir's software solves their problems. Both Palantir and major cloud vendors like AWS and Microsoft have invested in FDEs to help customers build AI applications. Analyst firms Gartner and Forrester view FDEs as beneficial due to their intimate access to customers' environments and codebases, enabling real-time building and iteration. However, they caution that clients may develop an over-reliance on the vendor providing the FDE.