Forward Deployed Engineers ship frontier AI inside real client systems — banks, ministries, hospitals. This is the field's publication of record: how to become one, what it pays, who's hiring.
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Every company can now buy the same frontier model. When intelligence is a tap anyone can open, the advantage stops being who has it — and becomes who can land it. That person is the Forward Deployed Engineer.
Read this storyA Forward Deployed Engineer ships frontier AI inside a client's real systems — part engineer, part consultant, part product manager. The bar isn't “can you build a model.” It's can you make it survive contact with a client's mess. Invented at Palantir, industrialised by OpenAI and Anthropic, now spreading into banks, ministries and hospitals worldwide.
The full breakdown — and how it differs from solutions, ML and sales engineers
Plus Scale AI, G42 and the systems integrators building on top of them — the desk tracks every posting we can verify.
For engineers
You've shipped real systems. The path turns that into the field's highest-leverage role — starting with a three-minute read of where you stand today.
Start the pathFor employers
Deployment talent is scarce and mis-hired. We surface engineers vetted on what the job actually is.
See the hiring desk“I wasn't hired to write the model. I was hired to make it survive contact with a ministry's twenty-year-old systems.”
Three minutes tells you your archetype and exactly what to learn next. Free — and you'll get The Dispatch, our weekly wire on who's hiring.