Forward Deployed Engineering

Your FDE team, embedded.

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a senior AI engineer who embeds inside your company — in your Slack, your repo, your on-call — and owns delivery of production AI systems end-to-end. fdeai.agency is the agency model: you get the FDE without competing with OpenAI's recruiting machine.

Not a consulting deck. Not a POC. A working system in 90 days.

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800%

Growth in FDE job postings since 2024

$450K

Average senior FDE total comp

90 days

From kickoff to production system

What we build

Four FDE specialties.

Match your engagement to the type of AI work you need done.

FDE-Agent
Most requested

We design, build, and deploy production AI agents — orchestration, tool use, memory, eval loops. End-to-end.

  • Multi-agent pipelines
  • LLM evals & red-teaming
  • Prompt engineering at scale
FDE-Infrastructure

ML infra, vector databases, fine-tuning pipelines, GPU cluster ops. The foundation your models need.

  • RAG pipelines
  • Embedding infrastructure
  • Inference optimization
FDE-Eval

Systematic evaluation frameworks that give you confidence before you ship — and after.

  • Automated test harnesses
  • Human-in-the-loop review
  • Safety benchmarking
FDE-Sovereign

Air-gapped, on-prem, or regulated-cloud deployments for defense, finance, and healthcare.

  • FedRAMP / HIPAA
  • Air-gapped LLM deployment
  • On-prem fine-tuning
Full service details →
Engagement model

Scope. Embed. Ship.

01

Scope

We run a rapid technical discovery — 2 days, no fluff. Output: a concrete engagement spec with timeline and success criteria.

02

Embed

A senior FDE joins your team. In your Slack, in your standups, in your codebase. They own delivery end-to-end.

03

Ship

Working system in production. Handoff docs, runbooks, and an eval suite so your team can own it forever.

Why fdeai.agency

We ship. Not slide decks.

Most AI engagements end in a POC nobody owns. We work differently — FDEs join your team, take on-call, write runbooks, and hand off a system your engineers can maintain.

  • ✓Senior engineers only — every FDE has shipped in production
  • ✓Embedded, not outsourced — in your Slack, your sprints, your repo
  • ✓Fixed-scope engagements — no scope creep, no surprise invoices
  • ✓Eval-first methodology — every system ships with an automated test suite
  • ✓Knowledge transfer included — your team owns it after we leave

Ready to ship your AI system?

Tell us what you're building. We'll scope it, staff it, and ship it.

Start a projectSee our work