Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers

“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long time.” “Doing FDE” involves sending top consultants to a client, without tying them to a project. Instead they get a mission to build something valuable using new technology, and carte blanche to make that happen in a hurry. Sheehan has company in believing FDEs aren’t fundamentally new. Cloud monitoring vendor DoIT told The Register it has used FDEs since 2011, but only started using the term in the last quarter of 2025, when it changed the name of its “Customer Reliability Engineering” practice to FDE. That decision came as services companies adopted the term FDE to describe the work needed to build AI proofs of concept. …