Forward Deployed Engineers for AI-Native Companies
Your AI pilot works in the demo and stalls in production. A forward deployed engineer works inside your team, in your repos and your customers' environments, and gets it shipped. Senior engineers, based in India, on hours that overlap with yours.
- Embedded in your team, not behind a ticket queue
- On-prem and air-gapped deployments done before
- You own every line of code and every runbook
What a forward deployed engineer actually does
Palantir made the model famous: put engineers where the customer's problem is, not three handoffs away from it. A forward deployed engineer (FDE) owns the gap between your product and the messy reality it has to run in: data that doesn't match the schema, auth that doesn't match the docs, latency budgets nobody wrote down, and a security team that wants everything on-prem.
That gap is where most AI projects die. The model is fine. The integration, the data pipeline, the deployment and the operational handover are not. An FDE closes that gap with working code, merged into your repos, reviewed by your team.
We are not a staffing agency. You don't get a CV to approve and a contractor to manage. You get an engineer who has run production systems, who writes down decisions, and who measures progress in merged pull requests and things customers can use.
When you need one
- An AI pilot works in a notebook or a demo but nobody owns getting it into production.
- An enterprise customer needs your product deployed on-prem, in their cloud, or fully air-gapped.
- Integration work for new customers is blocking deals, and your core team can't keep context-switching into it.
- You need a geospatial or data pipeline that has to be right, not just fast to demo.
- You are hiring for this role, it will take months, and the deployment can't wait.
What we have shipped
Air-gapped geospatial intelligence
An offline Earth Observation system for a secure government deployment: Sentinel-2 and Landsat analysis, Airflow ingestion and automated QA, with no internet connection at runtime.
Navratna agent runtime
Our own multi-agent orchestration runtime: isolated, resumable coding workspaces, governed artifacts, adaptive model routing and verified outcomes.
Geospatial platform at national scale
Our founder led the geospatial platform at Ola Krutrim: 2 billion API requests a day at sub-50ms p99, an in-house geocoder, and a vector tile pipeline that cut generation time by 90%.
Dhruva offline geocoder
An offline-first India geocoder written in Rust, covering the 22 scheduled languages and built to run on low-end phones for field teams without connectivity.
How an engagement runs
1. Scoping call
30 minutes with an engineer. Within 48 hours you get a written scoping note: what we'd do first, what we need from you, and what done looks like.
2. Embed
Access to repos, environments and the people who own them. The goal for week one is a merged pull request, not a slide deck.
3. Ship weekly
A written weekly update with a demo, a decision log and the next week's plan. You always know what changed and why.
4. Hand over
Runbooks, architecture notes and a walkthrough for your team. No lock-in: the system has to run without us.
Engagement models
Embedded FDE
One senior engineer working full-time in your team, billed monthly. Best for an ongoing deployment or integration stream.
Deployment pod
Two or three engineers with a lead, for a fixed push: a customer go-live, an on-prem rollout, a migration.
Fixed-scope sprint
Two weeks, one outcome, one price. Good for a first step before a longer engagement. See Production Gravity.
Frequently asked questions
How is an FDE different from hiring a contractor?
A contractor takes tickets. An FDE takes ownership of an outcome: getting a system live in a real environment. That means talking to your customer's IT team, debugging their network, writing the runbook and pushing back when the scope is wrong.
Do you work in our time zone?
We agree an overlap window before we start. From IST we cover the European working day and the US East Coast morning comfortably; most teams get three to four hours of live overlap a day plus written async updates.
Can you deploy on-prem or in an air-gapped environment?
Yes. We have shipped a fully offline geospatial intelligence system for a secure government deployment, and we regularly run open-weight LLMs on client hardware so no data leaves their network.
Who owns the code?
You do. Everything is written in your repositories under your accounts. We default to boring, well-documented technology so your team can maintain it after we leave.
How quickly can someone start?
Typically within one to two weeks of agreeing the scope. The scoping call and written note come first, so you know exactly what you are paying for before anyone starts.
How is it priced?
Embedded engineers are billed monthly; pods and sprints are fixed-price. Tell us your budget range in the form and we will say honestly whether it fits before you spend time on a call.
Tell us what needs to ship
Five fields. An engineer reads it and replies within one working day (IST), usually with a first opinion, not a sales pitch.