Your LinkedIn is suddenly filled with posts and job ads for the forward-deployed engineer (FDE) role. What does that even mean?
The term FDE was coined by Palantir, which provides data integration and analysis platforms for governments, including the defense industry. In tech, this engineer is deployed to a client, or to internal developer customers, to help them prepare for and respond to complexity — like the massive change of AI.
As Director of Platform Engineering, Nick Ness says his and other platform teams at 84.51˚, a retail data science, insights, and media company, embed on application teams to help jumpstart “major migrations, or to test new patterns in beta teams where we are still figuring out what changes will be made or problems that we will encounter in the real world.”
