This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vinoo Ganesh, the 34-year-old CEO of Kepler. He spent over six years at Palantir in the 2010s and later worked at Citadel. He’s based in New York. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
Palantir had a program we called Project Frontline. The idea behind Frontline was: How do we take software engineers and expose them to life as a forward-deployed engineer?
I actually went through a version of this before the program. I started off on the product development team, did a rotation that lasted for a long time as a forward-deployed engineer, then went back to the product development team.
I was running the program for a good chunk of time. We had a bunch of people go through it. Some folks stayed as forward-deployed engineers; some rotated back to becoming software engineers.
At the time, the state of the world was that forward-deployed engineers were moving really fast, and were very close to the customer. The software engineering team tended to be geographically — literally, some folks were in Palo Alto — culturally isolated from the urgency the FDE team had.
The idea was: walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.
Palantir worked really hard to set all of these folks up for success. We would give them mentors. They would have two touch points: a forward-deployed engineering manager and a software engineering manager.
People loved it. They’d be in corporate housing for a few months, displaced somewhere other than their home office. It’s not like every FDE went through this program; it was a set of software engineers who expressed interest.
We called it “business engineering” at Citadel. The goal was much more focused on internal portfolio managers and analysts. Palantir’s FDEs are much more focused on customers external to the company. At Citadel, we were focused on folks internal to the organization.
It was still the same operating model: Citadel’s engineering team has a core product, and our goal is to better inform its development by engaging with portfolio managers, analysts, and associates.
What other companies get wrong about FDEs
I’ve always modeled forward-deployed engineers as being an extension of the product team. Your job is to solve problems to gain product insights that inform product development.
Some people are modeling it — incorrectly, in my opinion — as sales engineers. Some people are modeling it as quota-carrying salespeople. I’ve seen everything from a forward-deployed equity researcher to a forward-deployed principal architect.
I think “FDE” is being used incorrectly as a stopgap for lack of product-market fit at some of these companies. Where I see it being used is to force customers to use your product that otherwise may not want to.
Palantir had a culture of autonomy and empowerment. If you identified a problem, you’d be able to be the agent of action and go solve that problem. That’s what allowed FDEs to thrive.
I also think Palantir’s product is almost perfect for the forward-deployed engineering ecosystem. You’ve built this horizontal platform that can work in a variety of industries, and FDEs are the individuals creating the vertical applications.
I’d be thinking about our product and whether or not it’s relevant for an FDE function. I don’t think of an FDE as a way of selling more tokens. I don’t think of an FDE as a way to get users to use your product when they haven’t had a pain point solved.
It’s being used as a catch-all now for a combination of sales, customer success, or marketing functions to show that you care about customers.
I see a lot of organizations focused on trying to get their product in front of as many people as possible, whether or not that actually generates the compounding product returns.
The world isn’t black and white. There’s a whole bunch of middle grounds to what kind of FDE you need at what point in your trajectory. These are my opinions and not a formal statement around how Palantir did things.
I think this is the future of software engineering. If writing code isn’t the differentiator anymore, the opportunity is: how do you understand customers deeply and viscerally?
It’s really important to get software engineers globally more customer-aware. For me, the FDE is more of a mindset than a job title.
Do you work at Palantir? Contact reporter Henry Chandonnet on Signal at henrychand.30.
