Hire forward deployed engineers who ship inside your operations
A senior engineer embedded in your team, building on your systems and your data, staying until it runs. The working method the AI labs use for their largest accounts, applied to your company.
What you are getting
4 things that decide this
- 01Senior engineers only, each of whom has shipped a production system that people rely on. There's no bench of juniors behind them and no rotation off your project.
- 02They embed. Your repository, your standups, your review process, with at least four hours of overlap with your working day agreed before anyone starts.
- 03They ship into live operations, not into a demo. Code, prompts, pipelines and integrations are yours from the first commit, in your accounts.
- 04The engagement ends on purpose: a trained owner on your side with runbooks, or a service level with us answering when it breaks. You interview every engineer first, and if the fit is wrong we replace them.
What a forward deployed engineer does on your team
The role comes from Palantir, where the mandate is 'to achieve technical outcomes for our customers.' It spread to OpenAI, Anthropic and AWS once a working model stopped being the hard part of an AI project. Those labs assign their engineers to their largest accounts. Ours are assigned to you.
In practice the first week goes on your data and your workflow, not on a product. For Sutherland Excavating, that meant AI and IoT site management built into how real petroleum sites are run and checked. ZhoopZhoop needed an AI receptionist and parts ordering that worked across auto-repair branches with their own habits. WAIQ needed an operations and execution platform for a multi-site business, where the hard part was agreeing what 'done' meant at each site.
None of those started from a generic product with a manual. Each was built on the client's own process, in the client's own systems, by an engineer who sat in the standup the next morning to hear what broke.
In numbers
What you can check
4.8
Clutch rating across 22 client reviews
Clutch, verified 2026-08-25
4h+
minimum overlap with your working day, agreed before start
Engagement terms, staff augmentation
2017
founded; engineering in Lahore, HQ in East Islip, NY
Company record
What they take off your plate
Integration into the systems you already run
Your ERP, CRM, field-service tool, practice-management system or whatever you run. The engineer reads its data model and writes to it properly, with the permission rules your admins expect.
Data that's messier than the demo
Duplicate records, half-migrated fields, three spellings of the same customer. The build starts from what's actually there, and the cleanup is part of the work rather than a surprise.
The workflow nobody wrote down
Every operation has steps that live in someone's head. The engineer sits with that person, maps the real process, and builds for it, including the exceptions.
The handover
Runbooks, training for your team, and a monitoring setup that tells you before your customers do. Or a service level, if you'd rather we keep answering.
- Scoping callFree. What's stuck, what has to change.
- ShortlistEngineers who've shipped this shape before.
- You interviewYou can decline anyone.
- EmbedYour repo, your standups, your review.
- ShipInto live operations, in increments.
- Hand overTrained owner, or a service level.
A paid two-week diagnostic sits between the call and the shortlist only when we have to go into an existing codebase to give you an honest answer.
Some of the systems we have shipped
“They will treat your vision like their own and build it that way.”
Ron Klabunde · Founder, SmartREI ↗
From the first call to a running system
- 01
Tell us what's stuck
A free scoping call about the process the software has to change and the systems it has to touch. Where we need to go into an existing codebase to answer honestly, a paid two-week diagnostic follows, and it ends in a fixed price.
- 02
Meet the engineer
You interview the engineer we propose, against your own questions. If they aren't right, you say so and we propose another.
- 03
They embed
Your repository, your standups, your review process, from the first week. Your engineers approve every pull request; there's no delivery manager in between.
- 04
They hand over, or stay
Runbooks and training so your team owns it, or an agreed service level where we keep answering. Either way the code, prompts and pipelines are in your accounts.
Stack
Systems they integrate with
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- NetSuite
- QuickBooks
- ServiceTitan
- Epic
- Postgres and SQL Server
- your own ERP
- or whatever you run
AI and data
- Claude
- GPT
- LangGraph
- Postgres + pgvector
- n8n
- FastAPI
- AWS
- Supabase
- etc.
Practices
- scored eval sets the client owns
- guardrails on tool use
- designed human handoffs
- audit trails
- runbooks written as we go
Tell us what has to run on your systems
A free scoping call with a senior engineer, not a salesperson. You'll leave knowing whether an embedded engineer is the right shape for it.
01How is this different from the forward deployed engineer a vendor sends?+
Ours has no product to sell you. A vendor's FDE is there to deploy the vendor's platform; an embedded engineer from us builds whatever makes your process run, which sometimes means integrating tools you already own and sometimes means telling you not to buy the thing you called about. The working method is the same: in your systems, on your data, until it runs.
02Can we change the engineer once they've seen our systems?+
Yes. You interview every engineer before they start, and if the fit turns out wrong after they've embedded, we replace them and handle the knowledge transfer ourselves. The code, notes and runbook are in your repository throughout, so a change of person doesn't cost you the context.
03How much of our working day will the engineer overlap?+
At least four hours, agreed before anyone starts, and most clients extend that so standups and code review happen live rather than as a handoff across time zones. Our engineering team is in Lahore, which gives a full morning of overlap with the US East Coast and most of the working day with Europe.
04Who owns the code, prompts and integrations they build?+
You do, completely, from the first commit. Source, prompts, eval sets, pipelines and infrastructure configuration sit in your accounts. Nothing is licensed back to us and nothing depends on us to keep running once the handover is done.
05Do we need to have bought an AI product first?+
No. The first week is spent on your data and your workflow, and the answer to 'which product, if any' comes after that. If a packaged tool is the right call, the engineer integrates it; if the gap is a small custom system or a connection between two tools you already run, they build that instead.
06What decides the cost of an embedded engineer?+
Three things: how many systems the work has to touch, how clean the data in them is, and whether someone on your side can make decisions weekly. We don't publish rates because a number quoted before seeing the problem is a guess. Scoping calls are free, and where an existing codebase is involved a paid two-week diagnostic ends in a fixed price.
Related
- What is a forward deployed engineer? →The definition, the Palantir origin and the three names for one role.
- Can a small or mid-size business get a forward deployed engineer? →Yes, through an embedded senior engineer. What the engagement looks like.
- FDE vs solutions engineer vs consultant →A decision table: who writes the code and how long they stay.
- Forward deployed AI engineer: what changes when the product is a model →Evals, guardrails, data plumbing and handoffs.
- Staff augmentation →The engagement terms behind this page.
- Hire a dedicated development team →When the work needs more than one engineer.
- AI agents and automation →What the AI-shaped engagements build.
