Palantir veteran breaks down the rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer and how to do it right
rseroter · x · 2026-09-15
A Latent Space interview with Kepler CEO and former Palantir FDE lead Vinoo Ganesh examines the hottest job in AI.
Key points:
- FDEs are being hired everywhere—labs, startups, PE firms—but almost no one agrees what the role is; if you're not an extension of product/engineering, you're a renamed sales engineer
- Ganesh built the function three times: leading Palantir's Project Frontline, which trained 250 FDEs now running teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril; running business engineering at Citadel where the only metric was alpha generation; and now at Kepler, where FDE sits inside product for domains where a plausible wrong answer is worse than none
- Covers the FDE-vs-consulting boundary and industry moves like a16z's FDE Fellowship
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