Right now, the most talked about role in AI isn’t a researcher, or a project manager, or a technical developer. It’s a Forward Deployed Engineer. And depending on who you ask, some might say it’s the most coveted too. OpenAI literally just spent four billion dollars to stand up a company around the role. Anthropic, Google, and others are hiring versions of it as fast as the market will let them. Last year, almost nobody was hiring for this. This year, almost everyone is.
We’ve been watching this happen with a strange feeling of recognition. At Transparent Partners, we work to engineer better marketing, and the way we do it has looked like something the broader industry didn’t quite have a name for. Now it has one: Forward Deployed Engineering. The job description reads like our weekly status meetings.
What A Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Does
The role started at Palantir in the early 2010s. Their customers were mostly intelligence agencies, and those customers couldn’t easily explain what they needed. The work was too sensitive and too tangled up in the daily reality of the team to translate into a normal requirements document. So Palantir tried something different. They sent their engineers into the customer’s office. The engineers learned by watching. They built the software while sitting next to the people who would use it. They improved it in real time, for real problems, with real feedback.
The same pattern is showing up now with AI. Companies trying to figure out how to use AI can’t fully specify what they want because nobody knows yet what will be possible in the future. The answer gets discovered in the doing – integrating yourself in the day-to-day workflows of the client, and figuring out what can be optimized. A help desk can’t bridge that gap, and neither can a Notion doc. Someone has to be in the room.
Why This Way Of Working Is Winning
For a long time, working with an outside expert went like this: they interviewed the team, watched how things ran, wrote a recommendation, handed it off, and left.
The newer version goes more like this: they sit alongside the team, build the thing with them, launch it together, and stay accountable when something breaks at 11pm on a Thursday.
That shift moves ownership back to the people doing the work. The deliverable stops being a document and becomes something that actively runs. Success stops being measured at the moment of launch and starts being measured by whether the work is still working three months later. The same shift is happening across the industry. Some firms have called it out, while others are quietly restructuring without fanfare.
Why This Isn’t Just For Tech Work
Most of the Forward Deployed coverage focuses on engineers shipping AI products, because that’s where the demand is loudest. In the engineering world, the role is often described as the intersection of three existing disciplines: software engineer, platform engineer, and solutions architect.
But the way of working applies far beyond that intersection. It shows up in any kind of expert work where the answer has to be discovered in the doing.
Picture how most big strategy projects end. A team spends months on a brand refresh or an audience deep dive. The deck is beautiful. The leadership team nods. Six months later, you ask the brand managers what’s different about how they work and nobody can quite point to it.
The work was sound, but nobody built it into the way decisions get made.
A brand strategy is just a deck until a media planner is reaching for it while building next quarter’s plan. A measurement framework is just a paper until someone is pulling it up in a Monday meeting to decide what to do. An audience strategy is just a slide until the creative team is using it without being reminded.
The companies getting value out of these investments aren’t buying presentations. They’re buying partners who stay close enough to the team to know which Monday meeting the answer has to land in.
The Kind Of Person Who Does This Work
The people who do this work well don’t fit a standard mold. They aren’t pure strategists, and they aren’t pure builders. They’re hybrids, and the hybrid is what makes them rare.
A few things they tend to have in common.
They can sit with ambiguity longer than most people are comfortable with. The first month of an engagement doesn’t produce a deck, and that has to be okay. They spend that month learning the team’s vocabulary, watching who makes decisions, and reading the docs nobody outside the company has read. Every company has the meeting where decisions get made, and the three meetings that prep you for it. Telling them apart is half the job. That kind of patience is hard to fake.
They can do the work, not just describe it. That means building the measurement model and defending the strategy underneath it. It also means writing the brand framework and knowing how it lands when a copywriter is staring at it on a Friday afternoon.
They notice the small things. When a team’s vocabulary shifts in a meeting, something underneath is usually shifting too. When the same person keeps getting interrupted, that matters. The work depends on reading rooms, not just analyzing them.
They don’t need the credit. The goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the meeting. It’s to help the team reach a point where they don’t need the smartest outsider in the room anymore.
That’s a rare profile. And it’s why we hire the way we do.
The Honest Limits
This way of working has real downsides. It’s slow to start, because the first month doesn’t look like progress from the outside. You can’t drop a new face into a team mid-engagement and expect things to keep moving at the same pace. Done poorly, it can quietly turn into dependency, where the client team has the tool but can’t change it or fix it without calling us.
But we work this way for a reason. Handoff is built into the deliverables from day one. We document as we go, train the people who will own the work, and step back at the end on purpose so the team can run things without us. The difference between a real partnership and a long-term crutch is whether the work outlives the engagement.
The Takeaway
The Forward Deployed label is new. The way of working isn’t. Engineering better marketing has always required this kind of operation. AI has just made it impossible to ignore.
If your next AI project, your next measurement framework, or your next big initiative is going to be delivered by a partner who hands you a deck and walks away, you’re buying yesterday’s product. The companies winning right now are the ones whose partners show up, build, and stay until the work actually works.
That’s the work we like to do. If you’re thinking about your next project, we’d like to talk.
Lauren McCune, Sr. Analyst
