https://video.ut0pia.org/videos/watch/62798146-f876-4c99-be61-ff56a3e24432 At Palantir, forward deployed started as a literal description: you were deployed, physically, at the customer's site, and the onboarding project was keeping the platform from falling over. Natalie Meurer's dirty secret is that the title never settled after that. It stretched across DevOps, data integration, ontology work in Slate and then Foundry, and solution architecture, until forward deployed engineering meant so many different jobs that the label stopped meaning much. Every company hiring for it, whether they call it forward deployed, customer, or deployed engineering, is describing a slightly different role of a particular vintage. Her argument is that the through line was never the code. As coding agents make writing software cheap, the durable part of the job is the rest of it: integrating the data, understanding the customer, and being accountable to an outcome. That is also why she thinks what the industry now calls agent engineering is really forward deployed engineering under a new name. The tell is in how you charge for it: seat based pricing assumes a tool, while pricing to usage or outcome assumes you are on the hook for the result, which is exactly what a forward deployed engineer has always been. Speaker info: https://x.com/natalie_meurer, https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliemeurer, Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction: the dirty secret of FDE 1:54 - FDE as a subdiscipline of AI engineering 3:46 - Palantir origins: leading with location 4:51 - Firefighting platform stability 6:37 - DevOps, data, and the ontology in Slate 9:02 - Why FDE is not one thing 10:46 - Every company hires a different vintage 12:28 - When code gets cheap, outcomes matter 13:55 - Pricing: seats vs usage vs outcome 15:26 - Agent engineering is FDE reborn Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:54:38 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.ut0pia.org https://video.ut0pia.org/lazy-static/avatars/0287a09a-aae7-4840-9843-b416426e7046.webp https://video.ut0pia.org/videos/watch/62798146-f876-4c99-be61-ff56a3e24432 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.ut0pia.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.