The Forward Deployed Engineer walks in

The previous article showed you the tool, MCP, that universal socket that opens up your systems. One question remained. Who holds the plug? Who walks into the company to decide where to plug in AI, and how?

That someone has a title, still unknown to the general public two years ago, and now becoming the most coveted job in tech. It’s called the Forward Deployed Engineer.

The job that exploded in silence

The term comes from Palantir, which coined it more than ten years ago. The idea: take the engineer out of the office and send them inside the client company, in contact with the real processes, to build and deploy the solution on site. Not a consultant who hands in a report. Someone who moves in and delivers.

For a decade, nobody outside Palantir paid attention. Then AI arrived, and the job exploded. In one year, postings for this role jumped more than eleven hundred percent. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Databricks — all are building dedicated teams. Box’s CEO sums up the situation in one sentence: it will soon be one of the most sought-after jobs in tech.

I owe you a clarification, because I don’t like operating under a mask. On my personal scale of values, few companies strike me as worse than Palantir. That’s an opinion, mine, and I own it. But it would be dishonest to let that aversion cloud my analysis. The model they invented, the engineer deployed at the client’s, will in my view become the norm. You can hate where an idea comes from and recognize that it’s going to win. That’s even the precondition for getting ready for it.

My conviction, and it is not the official definition

Let me be honest with you on one point, because it matters. The canonical definition of this job, inherited from Palantir, insists on code. A software engineer, first and foremost.

I believe AI is moving that cursor, and this is where I go out on a limb. The rising profile is no longer just the computer scientist. It’s the person, sometimes from another field entirely, who became extremely competent in AI by teaching themselves, and who above all knows the company’s processes from the inside. Their value isn’t in the engineering degree. It’s in the ability to look at a trade, spot what can be automated, and articulate it clearly enough for the AI to take it on. The trade outranks the code.

That’s my thesis, not engraved truth. But I’m not pulling it from a book. I lived it. Remember my March assignment: it was a sourcer, an HR guy, they went and got to deliver an AI roadmap for the entire company. Not an engineer. Proof, by my own example, that what counts isn’t the title on the business card, but the ability to understand a trade and retool it.

What I did in March, and what people asked me for

In early March, I carried out exactly this type of assignment, in a large SME in the Fribourg region. And note the starting point, because it says everything: I wasn’t called in for recruiting or for HR, my original trade. I was brought in to walk into the company, talk with people, observe how things actually get done, and produce a roadmap on where to put AI into the processes. With considerable gains at stake. For some teams, we’re talking about recovering the equivalent of one day per week. An entire day, spent on tasks with no added value, perfectly automatable.

And here’s the detail I want you to remember, because it changes everything. I wasn’t the one who showed up to hunt people down and replace them. It was the other way around. They were the ones who asked me. Here are the tasks that serve no purpose, they told me, and if I could get rid of them, I could finally focus on what moves the company forward.

It’s not the same thing, and that’s the whole challenge of how these subjects are brought up.

I loved doing it. Sincerely.

The real work starts afterward

The report is the easy part. The hard part, and the decisive one, is going from the report to actual implementation inside the company. And that’s where the shoe pinches, because companies don’t have these skills in-house. They know they have to move, they don’t know how.

That’s why I’m making this bet: the Forward Deployed Engineer role is going to spread. First in large corporations, which have the means to go get one. Then, and this is where the real opportunity lies, in SMEs, which need it just as much and don’t yet have access to it.

There’s an insane opportunity here. For those who’ll want to embody it, and for the companies that will know how to seize it. The question remains, once again, who will grab it.