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.

This 22-minute talk covers how we practice that at Kepler, built on what I learned running Project Frontline at Palantir and leading FDE practices at Citadel.

Proximity Discovers Truth

Building in isolation is expensive in ways you don’t find out about until production. A data store I worked on early in my career was designed without understanding that real customer data was full of null timestamps — which defaulted to the Unix epoch, generated millions of unwanted key spaces, and blew the memory budget by orders of magnitude. The information existed. Nobody was close enough to the data to see it.

Solve the Small Problem First

A shipping customer once sent a 47-page requirements document asking for custom dashboards and fourteen metrics. Four months of scoping went into it. Then an engineer asked a dispatcher on site what the first thing they did on Monday morning was, and learned the actual need was a Slack alert for late trucks. That took hours, not months — and it bought the trust to do the bigger work.

Watch Workflows, Not Words

A data quality engineer resisted a migration to Parquet for a year, insisting the format was worse. She wasn’t wrong about her experience: she was downloading CSVs and opening them in Excel, and Parquet broke that. The fix wasn’t a better argument, it was a Parquet viewer. She approved the migration two days later, and pipeline runtime went from 17 hours to two.

Define the Language

Sales says “customers,” ops says “clients,” finance says “billing entities,” and all three mean something slightly different. Finding the contested nouns and canonicalizing them is real product work — when a customer adopts your product, they adopt your vocabulary. Palantir’s ontology mattered for exactly this reason.

Every Hack Is Permanent

The most dangerous phrase in this job is “this is just temporary.” Undisclosed shortcuts end up running in production for years with no owner. Ship every fix as though it will run for eighteen months, because it will.

Questions about FDE or how we run it at Kepler? Feel free to reach out.