Solutions
Forward Deployed Engineering Services
Engineers who embed with your customers, turn ambiguity into shipped integrations, and shorten enterprise time to value.
Forward Deployed Engineering places engineers inside your customer engagements to convert ambiguous enterprise requirements into working integrations. It addresses a specific failure: deals that close in sales and then stall for months in implementation. Engagements typically run three to twelve months per account.
The problem this solves
There is a distinct failure mode in enterprise software, and it is not a sales problem. The product works. The demo lands. The contract is signed. Then implementation begins, and four months later the customer still has not reached production because their data does not look like the documentation assumed, three internal teams disagree about ownership, and the integration everyone described as straightforward turned out to involve a system nobody has touched since 2016.
A Forward Deployed Engineer exists for exactly that gap. They work on the customer's side of the boundary, learn how things genuinely are rather than how they are described, and write the production code that makes your product deliver value in that environment. They are not solutions architects producing diagrams and they are not support engineers closing tickets. They ship.
What we build
- Discovery that produces a working integration plan rather than a slide deck
- Production integration code against systems that were never designed for it
- Data model reconciliation between your product and the customer's reality
- Migration and backfill tooling for historical data
- Feedback into your product team, so recurring customisations become features
- Runbooks and handover so the customer is not permanently dependent on us
How we approach it
Embed and observe
The first week is spent understanding the customer's actual systems, constraints and internal politics. Skipping this is why most implementations slip.
Find the real blocker
There is usually one specific thing preventing value — an undocumented data format, a missing permission, an unowned decision. Naming it precisely is most of the work.
Ship the narrowest thing that works
We build the smallest integration that delivers real value, put it in production, then extend. Big-bang integrations fail slowly and expensively.
Generalise deliberately
Customer-specific work that recurs across accounts gets pushed back into the core product, with a clear rationale. Work that does not recur stays local.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Forward Deployed Engineer?
An engineer who embeds with a specific customer, learns their real systems and constraints, and writes production software that makes your product deliver value in that environment. It is a coding role positioned between product engineering and customer success.
How is this different from professional services?
Traditional professional services are usually scoped, billed and delivered as a project with a defined output. Forward Deployed Engineering is continuous, embedded, and explicitly feeds requirements back into the product. The distinction matters because the second improves your product and the first generally does not.
How long does a typical FDE engagement last?
Usually three to twelve months per account. Shorter than three months rarely allows enough context to be useful; beyond twelve months the work has often become either core product engineering or ordinary support, and should be structured as such.
Do FDEs need to be on-site?
Periodically, especially at the start of an engagement. Most of the work is remote, but early on-site time surfaces constraints that never appear in a video call. Time-zone overlap with the customer matters more than for most engineering roles.
Will this create dependency on your engineers?
It should not, and we design against it. Every engagement includes runbooks, documented decisions and a handover plan. If a customer cannot operate the integration without us after the engagement ends, we did the job badly.