KENNY CHIEN / CONSULTING / FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERING
Forward Deployed Engineering
The consulting model is broken. The fix is engineers who deploy forward — into your team, your data, your production.
Forward Deployed Engineering is the practice Palantir built its delivery model on: instead of writing recommendations from the outside, engineers embed inside the customer, live with the real data and the real users, and ship working software as the means of consulting. The deliverable is not a deck — it is a system in production and a team that can run it.
I run FDE engagements on that playbook, adapted for the agentic era: embedded in your sprint cadence, pairing with your engineers, turning every deployment into training. The measure of success is what your team ships after I leave.
“Slideware is a promise. A go-live is a fact.”
The FDE playbook
Deploy into the problem
Work happens where the data and users are — your repos, your meetings, your on-call. Understanding earned on the inside beats interviews from the outside.
Two hats: delivery and feedback
Palantir splits the role: engineers who bend the platform to today's customer problem, and engineers who feed what they learn back into the product. We run the same loop — every workaround becomes a roadmap item.
Ship against real data
No synthetic demos. The first week ends with software touching your actual systems behind your actual permissions — that is where every hard problem lives.
Ontology-first integration
Following Palantir's core lesson: integrate meaning, not just data. Model the business objects and actions once, and every later application inherits them.
Go-lives over slideware
Progress is measured in working deployments and trained operators — never in decks delivered.
How an embed runs
Immerse
Inside your repos, standups, and incident channel. First working change in production by Friday — small, but real.
Ship & pair
Agentic features delivered in your cadence, always pairing. Every PR is a teaching artifact; every review, a transfer of taste.
Hand over
I rotate out of the critical path. Your engineers lead; I review. Exit criteria: velocity holds after I am gone.
What you walk away with
Production features shipped inside your own codebase and stack
Engineers fluent in agentic patterns — by building, not by workshop
An integration layer and conventions the next team inherits
A delivery culture that measures go-lives, not decks
Frequently asked questions
What is forward deployed engineering (FDE)?
Forward deployed engineering is a delivery model, honed at Palantir, in which engineers embed inside the customer's team and ship working software as the means of consulting. The deliverable is a system in production and a team that can run it — not a recommendations deck.
How is an FDE embed different from staff augmentation?
A contractor adds hands; an FDE embed transfers capability. Every pull request is a teaching artifact and every review a transfer of taste, with explicit exit criteria: your team's velocity holds after I rotate out. I wrote more on this in The FDE mindset.
Is the embed remote or on-site?
Wherever your team works. The embed runs inside your repos, standups, and incident channel, which works fully remotely; on-site time is scoped per engagement when it genuinely helps. Either way, the first working change lands in production in week one.
Need an FDE in the building?
Tell me about the team and the system. I will tell you in one call whether an embed will pay for itself.