What Is A Forward Deployed Engineer?

Matt and Robert unpack the Forward Deployed Engineer: a Palantir-coined, customer-facing role that parks an engineer at a customer site for a set stretch of time. They trace the name to military “forward basing,” ask whether an FDE is just a consultant with better branding (or a one-person Pivotal-style embed), and look at why vendors bake these unicorns into the price of the software — so the product actually gets used instead of sitting on the shelf until next year’s renewal.

Links & mentions

• FDE on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_deployed_engineer
• A Day in the Life of a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer: https://blog.palantir.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-palantir-forward-deployed-software-engineer-45ef2de257b1