Skills · Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) · For universities
Your CS programme teaches the fundamentals. This teaches the part it can’t.
Every computer science graduate can write code. Almost none have built something for a real client’s needs — that’s the FDE skill, and it doesn’t fit inside a semester built for grades, not real projects. Twelve weeks. A cohort of twenty. A capstone on a live case from the IIDA problem bank. It runs under the same academic partnership your institution would sign anyway — not a separate purchase decision.
At a glance
12 weeks, one term
20 per campus cohort
Cohort, one evening a week plus project time, alongside a full course load
Paid for by the university under our academic partnership — free for students
The course
- One semester of real programming, not only coursework exercises
- Comfortable reading someone else’s codebase cold
- No prior client or industry experience required — that is what the course is for
- A shipped capstone and a case study for your portfolio
- A completion certificate signed by IIDA’s track lead
- The strongest students get a direct path to IIDA’s contributor track and our enterprise partners
- Reading a workflow: turning a stakeholder conversation into a build plan
- Shipping against a real specification that changes mid-project, on purpose
- Applied AI systems — retrieval, agents and evaluation, run against real data rather than a benchmark
- Production discipline: version control, code review, deployment and handover documentation
- Talking to a non-technical stakeholder without losing the technical detail that matters
Capstone. A working prototype against a real, anonymised case from the IIDA problem bank — not a toy dataset, and not a simulated client.
Why this pays
The scarcity argument
Graduate with the FDE skill enterprises can’t hire fast enough.
Not a headline salary number — something simpler. Most degrees teach the coding, or they teach the client-facing judgement. Almost none teach both. That’s exactly why so few graduates have the FDE skill, and exactly why it’s worth more.
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.
Bring this to your campus
Runs under the partnership
One cohort per term, capped at twenty.
This runs through the same academic partnership your institution would already sign with us for research access. It’s the student side of that same relationship — not a separate deal.