We arrive
A few hours a day with the people doing the job, not the process document. The gap between those two is where most of these projects quietly die.
Your forward deployed engineering team, on demand.
The team every AI company is trying to build, working as yours from week one. We sit with the people doing the work, ship into production inside the tools you already use, and then stay to run it. Nothing to hire, nobody to manage.
Where we usually get deployed
- Financial services
- Insurance
- Healthcare groups
- Logistics and trade
- Manufacturing
- Real estate
- Professional services
- B2B software
What ForwardOps does
ForwardOps is a forward deployed engineering team you bring in rather than build. You hand over one workflow and about a week of your team's time. We embed with the people who actually do the job, learn how the work really happens, ship it into production inside the software your staff already use, and then stay on to operate it.
Fixed published prices: $15,000 for a two week scoping engagement, from $75,000 to build and ship, from $9,000 a month to run it, from $35,000 a month for a standing function. Headquartered in San Francisco, with engineers in Bengaluru and Dubai.
01 The squeeze
Everyone wants an FDE. Almost nobody can hire one.
Forward deployed engineering went from a Palantir curiosity to the most contested role in software in about eighteen months. Job postings for it rose more than five thousand percent between January 2025 and April 2026. By the middle of last year roughly seven in ten companies said they intended to hire one.
There are around seventeen thousand of them in the United States, and Palantir, OpenAI and the large consultancies are hiring them in blocks of twenty to a hundred. So the search takes three to six months, you are bidding against balance sheets you cannot match, and at the end of it you have to interview for a profile your existing engineers have never worked alongside.
Or you bring in a team that already works this way, and we are sitting with your people a fortnight from now. Same model, no search: we embed, we ship production code in your systems, and we stay accountable for whether it actually works.
Two weeks
From signing to us working alongside your team, against three
to six months to hire one person
Nothing to build
No roles to fill, no offer to lose, nobody new to manage
We stay
Most firms ship and leave. We operate what we build, so nobody on
your side inherits it
02 The shape of it
What the first three months look like.
You see it working
Running on your own records, awkward cases included, rather than a tidy sample. You decide at that point whether any of this is worth continuing.
It is in production
Shipped inside the software your staff already have open. For most of them nothing changes except that a step which used to take an afternoon now does not.
We stay and take the next one
We keep operating what we shipped, and every workflow after the first is quicker, because the hard part of getting into your systems is behind us.
03 Engagements
Four ways to work with us, and you can stop after any of them.
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01
Scope
Two weeks on the ground. A week sitting with the people doing the work, then a week building a version of it on your own records. You end up holding something you have watched run, a number for what shipping it costs, and a number for what it saves. Sometimes the honest answer is that it is not worth building, and the report says that instead.
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02
Deploy
We ship the real thing, handling your actual records and the exceptions nobody ever wrote down. The invoice with no purchase order, the claim where the policy lapsed halfway through. It goes inside the software your staff already use, so nothing changes for them except that a slow step is no longer slow.
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03
Run
This is the part a recruiter or a staffing firm structurally cannot offer, because neither of them owns the outcome. We operate what we shipped: watched daily, fixed when it breaks, kept current as the technology shifts underneath it. Nobody on your side inherits a system they did not build.
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04
Standing function
We stay embedded and work through your backlog in the order of what each one saves you. This is what having your own forward deployed engineering function feels like, without the eighteen months it takes to build one.
04 Pricing
We publish our prices.
Almost every firm in this market quotes on request so it can anchor to whatever it thinks your budget is. Our scopes are fixed and so are the prices attached to them. If we get a scope wrong, absorbing it is our cost rather than your change order.
| Engagement | Shape | From |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Two weeks, one engineer, fixed fee | $15,000 |
| Deploy | Eight to sixteen weeks, staged | $75,000 |
| Run | Per month, annual | $9,000 |
| Standing function | Per month, ongoing | $35,000 |
For comparison, one in-house forward deployed engineer costs $450,000 to $550,000 a year at Series C or later. The only thing billed on top of these prices is the running cost of the software itself, at exactly what it costs us.
05 Fit
Whether this is worth a call.
Worth a call
- You have looked at hiring an FDE and stalled on cost, time or interviewing for it
- A workflow is slow, expensive, or produces too many mistakes to leave alone
- Somebody senior wants it fixed and can authorise the spend
- You can spare a week of the right people's time
Probably not us
- You want a recruiter or a staffing firm to fill a seat on your payroll
- You want a strategy document, a board deck or a readiness assessment
- Nobody senior has agreed the problem is worth solving
- The decision comes down to day rate alone
06 Questions
The things people ask first.
What is a forward deployed engineer?
An engineer who embeds inside your team rather than working from a vendor's office. They sit with the people doing the work, write production code in your own systems, and stay accountable for whether the thing actually works where you are. Palantir made the model famous and OpenAI, Deloitte and most serious AI companies have since copied it. There is a longer explanation here.
How fast can you have someone on the ground?
Usually inside two weeks of signing. That is the whole point of the arrangement. Building the same capability by hiring takes three to six months per person, assuming you win the offer.
Should we just build our own team instead?
Once the work is permanent, big enough for several people, and you have a technical leader who can interview for the profile, yes, build it. Below that the maths rarely works. One in-house FDE runs $450,000 to $550,000 a year at Series C or later, and you would be bidding into a market where postings rose more than five thousand percent in eighteen months. We would rather tell you to build than sell you something you do not need.
How are you different from a recruiter or a staffing firm?
A recruiter charges a fee to help you compete for a scarce hire and disappears once the offer is signed. A staffing firm sends people to work your queue under your direction. We are neither. We take the problem, ship it, and then keep operating it, which is the part nobody selling you a candidate or a timesheet can offer.
Do we need our own engineers for this to work?
No. We need access to the people who actually do the work and one senior person who can decide. If you do have engineers, we work alongside them and hand over cleanly rather than building a black box next to them.
Will we be locked into you?
You own the code, the documentation and the data, written so another firm or your own team could take over. Most clients keep us running it because they would rather not think about it, and we would rather earn that each year than hold you to it.
Is our information safe?
We work inside your own systems, in your own country where the rules require it, including the Bahrain and UAE regions for Gulf clients. We keep no copy of your data and we sign whatever your legal team needs before we see anything.
Tell us what is slow.
Four or five sentences about the workflow costing you the most time or producing the most mistakes. You do not need a brief and you do not need anyone technical in the room. We reply within two working days, and if you would be better off building the team yourself we will tell you that instead.