The Definitive Guide to Forward Deployed Engineering

Originally published on Next Play If you work in tech, you should learn about Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE). It’s quickly become one of the most popular roles that nearly all fast-growing AI companies are looking for…at the same time, it’s the type of role very few people and companies seem to actually understand. I designed Project Frontline at Palantir, a program that sent over 250 engineers into live customer deployments. Those engineers are now at OpenAI, xAI, Anduril, and dozens of leading companies. ...

February 5, 2026 · 27 min · Vinoo Ganesh

Context Is The Easy Part

Originally published on Kepler Everyone’s talking about context engineering right now, but most of the conversation is focused on the wrong thing. Read the blog posts, the guides, the thought leadership. They’re all asking the same questions: What should I include in the context window? How do I manage tokens efficiently? How do I curate what the model sees? These are valid questions. They’re also the easy part. The hard part isn’t deciding what context to include. It’s building systems that deliver that context reliably, with provenance, at scale, every single time. That’s not a context problem. That’s an engineering problem. And engineering means something specific. ...

January 30, 2026 · 4 min · Vinoo Ganesh

Introducing Kepler

Originally published on Kepler AI produces numbers that are incorrect, untraceable, and unverifiable. Asking the same question twice yields different answers, and there’s no way to distinguish right from wrong outputs. This unreliability poses serious risks across industries like healthcare, legal, insurance, government, and finance where numerical accuracy directly impacts outcomes. Through conversations with 137 financial firms - including private equity, hedge funds, and investment banks - a consistent pattern emerged: everyone wants to use AI, but nobody trusts it. As one managing director stated, “I can’t put a number in front of a client if I can’t show where it came from.” ...

January 30, 2026 · 2 min · Vinoo Ganesh

Building Chatbots with Rasa

Tell us about your background Throughout my career, I have dedicated myself to creating tools, products, and technologies that help people effectively utilize their data. My passion lies in developing products that enable users to efficiently and scalably gain maximum value from their data. My journey in understanding the intricacies of data and its potential began at Palantir Technologies, where I began working on search and indexing products. As data volumes grew, I focused my efforts on solving some of Palantir customers’ core problems across the financial and defense verticals before leading customer focused compute teams. After Palantir, I served as CTO at Veraset, a cloud-based data-as-a-service company. Veraset delivered high-quality, large scale data to a number of enterprises and grew to 15M ARR before being acquired. Following this, I joined Citadel Investment Group as the Head of Business Engineering of Ashler. In that role, I managed crucial data operations, including overseeing data pipelines, investment platforms, data lakes, and the software and data engineering teams responsible for them. ...

February 9, 2024 · 5 min · Vinoo Ganesh

Advance Your SQL Skills with dbt for Data Engineering

Managing SQL code at scale is one of the biggest challenges in data engineering. As data teams grow and pipelines become more complex, traditional approaches to SQL development quickly become unwieldy. This LinkedIn Learning course explores how dbt (data build tool) transforms the way we think about SQL development, bringing software engineering best practices to analytics engineering. Course Approach Real-World Problem Solving: Each chapter presents actual situations and challenges that data engineers face, with focused code examples showing practical solutions. ...

September 26, 2023 · 2 min · Vinoo Ganesh