Forward Deployed Engineering 101 — Kevin Bai, Anthropic, ex Palantir & Rippling Founding FDE
Jul 28, 2026 · 17:48
Kevin Bai of Anthropic, formerly at Palantir and Rippling, argues that Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the go-to-market motion for selling highly technical platforms to non-technical buyers, as Palantir did with its Foundry platform. The key is not building bespoke solutions from scratch but assembling outcomes on a reusable platform of shared primitives; otherwise it becomes a dev shop. FDE targets a specific quadrant: complex product + non-technical buyer, exemplified by Palantir's $4M average contract value vs. ServiceNow's $1.2M and Workday's $600K. Two questions determine need: is your product complex enough to require hand-holding, and do you have engineers who can carry that? AI has made building easy and nearly everything agentic, pushing FDE toward the center of software sales.
