Skills · Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) · For enterprises, startups & corporates
Your AI pilots work in the demo. They stop working in production.
The gap is never the AI model. It’s the engineer who can work inside your systems, your data rules and your stakeholders — and ship something that survives all three. That engineer is an FDE, and right now you’re paying a contractor’s markup to rent one. Six weeks. A cohort of six to ten. Run against your own problem. Your engineers leave able to do this themselves.
At a glance
6 weeks, full-time or near-full-time
6–10 per enterprise cohort
Intensive cohort, full engagement, on-site or remote with the sponsoring team
Paid for by your company, priced per cohort — like any project you’d hire us for
The course
- Two or more years shipping production software
- Comfortable owning a system end to end, not just a ticket
- Your employer signs you up for this — it isn’t a self-enrolled course
- A shipped pilot the enterprise owns outright
- Your own in-house FDEs, instead of an outside contractor
- The strongest engineers get a path into more paid work with IIDA
- Deploying inside constraints you do not control — legacy systems, restricted data access, a client’s own security review
- Working an ambiguous brief to a shipped pilot, on a fixed timeline
- Advanced applied AI systems in production — the failure modes a benchmark never shows you
- Managing a stakeholder relationship under a deadline the stakeholder keeps moving
- Handover: documentation and a runbook that survives the FDE leaving the room
Capstone. A pilot deployed against a live problem — either the sponsoring enterprise’s own, or one from the IIDA problem bank matched for fit.
Why this pays
The scarcity argument
Stop renting an FDE. Own the skill instead.
Every contractor relationship you keep is a bet that this market stays tight. Hiring FDEs won’t get easier. It will only get more expensive to keep not having one in-house.
Two skills, rarely one person
Most engineers can build. Few can sit with a client who isn’t sure what they want, figure out what they actually need, and build it inside someone else’s rules. That combination is naturally rare — not an accident.
The market already prices it
Palantir grew fast on this one role. Enterprises now try to hire FDEs directly, instead of paying outside contractors. A role this hard to fill costs more.
Demand is structural, not seasonal
Every enterprise adopting AI hits the same wall: it works in the demo, and nobody can get it running on their real systems. That gap only closes when an FDE is in the room.
Commission a cohort
Runs against your problem
Your engineers, your systems, your pilot at the end.
Six to ten engineers. Six weeks. Run against your own problem, or one matched from the bank. The enterprise owns what gets shipped, and your engineers keep the FDE skill after we leave — this isn’t a consulting project.