“Forward Deployed Engineering” sounds like a lot of jargon for a simple idea: instead of handing you a strategy document and wishing you luck, we send our own engineers to sit inside your team and build the thing with you.

Most consulting engagements end at a recommendation. Ours start there. An FDE is a senior engineer who joins your daily standups, gets access to your codebase in the first week, and starts shipping real, working code, usually within a few days rather than months. They’re not there to write a report about your AI strategy. They’re there to build the first version, fix what’s broken, and show your own engineers how to do it themselves next time.

The name comes from the military idea of “forward deployment”: putting people where the actual problem is, not observing it from headquarters. We borrowed the concept because it matches how we think AI projects should actually work. You don’t need another slide about what’s possible. You need someone who can sit down, open the repo, and start making it true.

By the time we leave, the goal isn’t just a working system. It’s a team that can maintain, extend, and build on it without needing us back in the room.