Anthropic Engineer Explains FDE: How Palantir Hits $4M Avg Contract Value
dotey · x · 2026-09-16
Kevin Bai, an engineer on Anthropic's Applied AI team and former founding member of Rippling's FDE team with years at Palantir, recently gave an FDE 101 talk explaining the Forward Deployed Engineer role.
The problem FDE solves: Palantir's Foundry is a technically demanding platform, but its buyers are non-technical executives in oil and consumer goods. Customers buy an "outcome," not software or consulting—engineers embed in the business and build the solution on the platform, while customers only care about more shelf products or better line efficiency.
The numbers: Among public SaaS companies by average contract value, Palantir hits $4M, vs. ServiceNow at $1.2M and Workday at $600K—no other exceeds $500K. Palantir achieved with a few thousand people what others couldn't with tens of thousands, via the FDE model.
FDE ≠ outsourcing: If engineers write bespoke code from scratch each time, that's outsourcing. FDE requires a reusable platform to assemble and customize on; without one, maintenance costs eat all profit and engineers churn juggling dozens of unrelated codebases.
Two questions to decide: Do you sell something technically complex to non-technical buyers? Products sold to engineers (GitHub, Datadog) or out-of-the-box tools (Slack, Jira) don't need FDE.
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