The first school for Forward Deployed Engineers.
We take you from AI novice to expert in six weeks. You leave knowing how to ship real AI systems and ready to do it inside any company in the world. OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Salesforce, and Google are hiring this role faster than anyone is training for it.
Where the role lives
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Palantir
- Salesforce
- ServiceNow
- Accenture
Job openings, indexed to 2023
Forward Deployed Engineer openings
Up 42x since 2023.
The role
Half engineer. Half consultant. Embedded in the customer until the system runs in production.
Seventy percent of AI pilots never reach production. Not because the models are wrong. Because nobody owns the last mile. The Forward Deployed Engineer is the person who owns it. Discovery, integration, agents, evals, deploy. End to end.
One of the highest-value roles in the world right now, and the one that makes you the person any company calls when the AI work has to actually ship. Salesforce is publicly committed to building a team of 1,000. OpenAI lists roughly thirty open FDE roles. Anthropic posts "Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI" as a core go-to-market motion. The pipeline doesn't exist yet. That's why FDE School exists.
Curriculum
How you become a Forward Deployed Engineer.
You become the AI native operator your company can't replace.
The capstone
The capstone project.
An operational copilot that ingests business events, queries databases, retrieves docs via RAG, calls external tools, suggests diagnoses, logs actions, and measures operational impact over time. You ship it. You write the design doc. You present it to a panel of working FDEs from Palantir, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Salesforce.
Guest faculty
Taught and shaped by people who actually ship.
Working Forward Deployed Engineers and operators drop into the live sessions to teach the technical modules.
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Working FDE at a frontier AI lab.
Applied AI. Previously Palantir.
Advising on the agents, evals, and reliability modules.
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Senior commercial leader from the firm where the FDE role began.
Active operator inside the company that invented the role.
Advising on the lineage of the FDE role and what it actually is.
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Veteran FDE with years of customer deployment experience.
Deep practitioner inside the firm where the role originated.
Advising on customer discovery, deployment, and the craft.
Who this is for. Who it isn't.
We turn down more applicants than we accept.
FDE School is for consultants, PMs, operators, and engineers retooling for the post-AI labor market.
FDE School is for you if
- You are a consultant, PM, operator, pre-sales pro, or engineer who wants to retool for the AI era.
- You can learn fast and you are comfortable getting hands-on with technical concepts.
- You want to work inside the company's AI work, embedded in the customer, not behind a Jira board.
- You will do the real project work and ship something that runs by the end of the program.
- You are transitioning into an FDE role at OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, Palantir, or another company actively hiring.
- You are upskilling inside your current company to become the person who actually ships AI for the business.
FDE School isn't for you if
- You want a passive certificate to hang on a wall, not a project running in production.
- You are not willing to build something real and do the work week over week.
- You want theory and lectures instead of shipping.
- You are not willing to present the capstone in front of working FDEs.
A note from the founder
I have spent the last decade in go-to-market. I have watched every wave of software produce a new role that lives in the seam between product and customer. AI is producing the most consequential one yet.
Forward Deployed Engineers are how AI actually ships inside the company. The companies setting the agenda have figured that out. The people who want the role have not yet figured out how to get into it. FDE School closes that loop.
The AI shift is forcing consultants, PMs, and operators to reshape their careers. The people who retool now win. The people who wait fall behind. FDE School takes capable, ambitious professionals from zero to one and they leave with a real project they shipped. The bar is drive and aptitude, not an engineering resume. If that sounds like you, join the waitlist.
Jerimiah Lancaster
Founder, FDE School
The guide.
The 2026 guide to the Forward Deployed Engineer.
Three thousand words on where the role came from, what it actually does, who is hiring, what they pay, and how to move into it from PM, engineering, pre-sales, or consulting. The canonical reference. Written by FDE School.
Waitlist
Join the waitlist.
Be first in line when applications open. Space is limited.