Building the Delta: FDE is Not Professional Services
By Niles Lawrence · Substack · Jan 04, 2026
Professional services deliver scope. Forward deployed engineering teams operate as a high-leverage extension of the customer’s team to deliver outcomes.
FDE teams deliver what internal teams often cannot. They aren’t constrained by competing priorities, bureaucracy, or legacy processes. They are highly talented, native to the latest technologies, and bring an unencumbered angle to any problem. They focus exclusively on the customer outcome, and in the process, define the next version of the product.
The author argues that the 800%+ jump in FDE job listings at OpenAI, Anthropic, Harvey, and others in 2025 reflects a fundamental truth: enterprise AI cannot be “implemented” like typical SaaS. It requires engineers embedded in the messy reality of customer workflows until value is real in production.
Key insight from the field (Palantir manufacturing example):
- Problem: Multi-site manufacturer with excess inventory; sites made decisions in isolation
- Approach: Shadow operators, codify their 20+ years of tribal knowledge into flexible rules
- Result: 50% reduction in excess inventory by changing the default from “order new” to “reuse”
The evolution at Sierra—from FDE to Agent Development:
- Embedding: Discover workflow constraints and where AI can best be leveraged
- Hardening the Core: Build agent logic + guardrails with operator-level nuance
- Iterating in Production: Ship with operational urgency, not roadmap committee speed
Forward deployed engineering is about operating as a high-leverage extension of the customer’s team. Not by “doing services faster” but by compressing time-to-outcome and by scaling customer expertise in ways internal roadmaps struggle to reach.