"Forward-deployed engineer" is the latest tech industry buzzword, but the people using it say it describes something they have been doing for years. The Register spoke to executives at SHI, DoIT, AWS, and Cisco who all said the practice of embedding senior consultants with customers to build quick proofs of concept is not new. What has changed is the label, which has become popular as companies struggle to turn AI experiments into production applications.
The term itself traces back to Palantir. CTO Shyam Sankar says he coined it in 2007 after CEO Alex Karp asked why French restaurants are so good. Karp's answer: the wait staff are part of the kitchen staff, intimately understanding the food and technique. Sankar says he was asked to build that for engineering, and called it "forward deployed engineering." Palantir's investors thought the idea was bad because it ate into margins, but Sankar argues it ensures customers understand the product.
The big cloud vendors are now embracing the concept. AWS announced a dedicated FDE organization in June with $1 billion in funding, while Microsoft followed in July with a $2.5 billion "Frontier Company" that it says goes beyond FDEs. AWS's Taimur Rashid said the company has offered similar arrangements since 2017, when it created the ML Solutions Lab to loan data scientists to customers. Cisco's Carlos Pereira echoed that, saying AI adds new variables but the embedded-expert idea is not new.