Architecture

Originally published on Latent Space FDEs have the hottest job in AI. Labs, startups and PE firms are all hiring engineers to sit inside their customers’ operations and solve their problems. Almost none of them agree on what those engineers are supposed to accomplish, or what the strategy underneath the hiring actually is. I’m Vinoo, CEO of Kepler, the deterministic infrastructure for AI. I’ve built pieces of the forward deployed function three times, at three different institutions, over the course of over a decade. Here’s what I’ve seen work, what I’ve seen fail, and where I think this goes. ...

Presented at AI Engineer. Finance used to be bottlenecked on producing content. It is now bottlenecked on verifying it. An analyst who once spent the day building a model now spends it checking whether a machine’s output can be defended to a client, a committee, or a regulator. ...

Presented at AI Engineer. Most companies hire forward deployed engineers as an extension of go-to-market: a technical body to keep a large account happy. That’s the wrong frame. FDE is a product strategy. The job is to find the real problem, ship the smallest thing that solves it, and turn what you learned into leverage for the product. ...

Originally published on Anthropic’s blog Inside a platform that indexes 26M+ SEC filings, earnings call transcripts, IR presentations, consensus estimates, and private data across 14,000+ companies and 27 global markets, and how the team behind it built AI that validates every number to the exact filing, page, and line item. The quick pitch NameKepler Founded2025 FoundersVinoo Ganesh (CEO) and John McRaven (CTO) StackAWS, Rust, Python, containers for orchestration GrowthIndexed 26M+ SEC filings, 50M+ public documents, 1M+ private documents, and 14,000+ companies across 27 global markets in less than three months. Financial firms operate in a heavily regulated environment where reporting has to be auditable and accountable. Every figure in a regulatory filing, deal pitch, or research report needs to be verifiable against source documents. ...

Part of Lenny Rachitsky’s “The AI-Native Product Manager” free workshop series on Maven. Most products fail not because of bad engineering, but because teams build the wrong thing. They either overbuild features nobody asked for or underbuild solutions that miss the real problem. Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the antidote. What is FDE? Forward Deployed Engineering is a methodology where technical teams embed directly with customers to witness how software meets reality. Instead of building from assumptions, FDEs develop customer instinct by being in the field — watching real users interact with real products under real conditions. ...