Writing

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. ...

I spoke with Henry Chandonnet at Business Insider about Project Frontline and what companies are getting wrong about forward deployed engineering. The full as-told-to is there. A short version of what I told them. What Project Frontline Actually Was It was a rotation, not a hiring funnel. We took software engineers and put them in front of customers with real support underneath them — dual mentorship, a way back out, and people whose job was to make sure the rotation worked. Around 250 engineers went through it. A lot of them run forward deployed teams now at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...