Forward-Deployed Engineering
An engineer inside your business. Working AI in weeks.
A forward-deployed engineer joins your team, learns how your company actually works, and builds AI that removes real bottlenecks. You see the first results within two weeks.
2-week Discovery Sprint · €2,900 fixed
What is a forward-deployed engineer?
The role comes from companies like Palantir and OpenAI. Instead of collecting requirements and disappearing into a backlog, a forward-deployed engineer works inside the customer’s business. They sit in your meetings, watch how the work gets done, find the highest-value problem, and ship software that fixes it.
The model exists because most AI projects fail for the same reason: they are built too far away from the real work. Hiring your own FDE costs well over €150,000 a year, and there are very few of them on the market. We give you the same model as a service.
Three ways to buy engineering. Only one is built for outcomes.
A consultant
Analyzes your processes and hands you a report. Someone still has to build the solution.
A dedicated developer
Gives you capacity. You decide what gets built and you manage the backlog. Great when you know exactly what you need.
A forward-deployed engineer
Finds the opportunity, builds the solution, and proves the value. You get outcomes, and you keep all the code.
Start with a 2-week Discovery Sprint
€2,900 fixed price
Week 1: Embed and map
The engineer joins your daily work, interviews your team, and maps where the hours are lost: manual data entry, document handling, reporting, support queues.
Week 2: Build and prove
We pick the highest-value target together and ship a working automation or AI assistant against it, connected to your real tools and data.
What you walk away with
- A working automation, live in production or as a pilot
- A prioritized AI roadmap for your business
- A concrete proposal for what to build next, with effort and impact estimates
- Full ownership of everything we build
Then keep the engineer, month by month
After the sprint you can continue with the same engineer on a monthly engagement. They keep building from the roadmap, embedded in your team and your tools.
€3,900/month
- A senior engineer embedded in your team, on your Slack or Teams
- Weekly demos of working software, not status reports
- Senior review on all AI-assisted code
- GDPR-compliant handling of your data
- You own all code and IP from day one
- Monthly billing, no long-term lock-in
What a forward-deployed engineer builds
Internal knowledge assistant
An assistant that answers your team’s questions from your own documents and systems. We have shipped this for a real client.
Read the case study →Document processing
Invoices, contracts and forms turned into structured data automatically, with humans checking the edge cases.
Workflow automation
Multi-step processes that cross your existing tools: ERP, CRM, email, spreadsheets.
Customer support assistant
Drafts answers and routes tickets so your team handles the judgement calls, not the typing.
Self-assembling reporting
Reports that build themselves from your data instead of eating someone’s Friday.
AI features in your product
Search, summarization and assistant flows inside your own application, built to production standards.
Built the safe way
- Your data is handled under GDPR, with a DPA when you need one
- Your code and data never train public AI models
- Senior engineers review everything AI-assisted before it ships
- You own everything we build, from the first commit
We take a limited number of forward-deployed engagements at a time, so every client gets a senior engineer.
Common questions
What exactly is a forward-deployed engineer?
A senior software engineer who works inside your business instead of behind a ticket queue. They learn your operations first-hand, find where software and AI would save the most time or money, and then build that solution themselves.
How is this different from hiring an AI consultant?
A consultant’s deliverable is advice. Our deliverable is working software. The Discovery Sprint ends with a real automation running against your real data, plus the roadmap. You never pay for a slide deck.
What happens after the Discovery Sprint?
You choose. Continue with the same engineer at €3,900 per month to build through the roadmap, hand the roadmap to your own team, or stop entirely. The code and the roadmap are yours in every case.
We are not sure where AI would even help us. Is that a problem?
That is the normal starting point, and it is what week one is for. The engineer maps your workflows and finds the opportunities. You do not need an AI strategy before you start.
How do you handle our data and GDPR?
We work under GDPR and sign a data processing agreement when needed. Your data stays in the systems and regions you approve, and it is never used to train public AI models.
What technology do you use?
Whatever fits your case: leading LLM providers or locally hosted models, retrieval over your own documents, and integrations with the systems you already run. We are not tied to a single vendor.
Find out what AI could remove from your team’s week.
Book a strategy call. We will tell you honestly whether a forward-deployed engineer makes sense for you, and what we would target first.