My (personal) email is in my profile."},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["palantir"],"value":"Ask HN: Palantir or Facebook?"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Doches","story_8236762"],"author":"Doches","comment_text":"OP, I'm a FDE at Palantir (not in NY) and I'd be glad to chat with you about the life/work/impact we have. I've been at several different tech companies with a variety of bizarro cultures (though not FB!), so maybe I can offer you a point of comparison on that as well.
My (personal) email is in my profile.","created_at":"2014-08-28T13:32:03Z","created_at_i":1409232723,"objectID":"8237077","parent_id":8236762,"story_id":8236762,"story_title":"Ask HN: Palantir or Facebook?","updated_at":"2024-09-19T21:06:20Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"OrvalWintermute"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["fde","palantir"],"value":"no one is going to conflate a Palantir FDE with an actual pipehitter
Contractors doing IT support aren't "Operators" in the tactical sense, nor agents in the LE sense, nor Officers in the IC sense, nor a Boeing/Lockheed/Leidos/etc type developing weapons.
This is just a new method to scapegoat a company"},"story_title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["palantir"],"value":"The Anti-Palantir Manifesto"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["palantir"],"value":"https://nonogra.ph/the-anti-palantir-manifesto-07-20-2026"}},"_tags":["comment","author_OrvalWintermute","story_48973293"],"author":"OrvalWintermute","comment_text":"no one is going to conflate a Palantir FDE with an actual pipehitter
Contractors doing IT support aren't "Operators" in the tactical sense, nor agents in the LE sense, nor Officers in the IC sense, nor a Boeing/Lockheed/Leidos/etc type developing weapons.
This is just a new method to scapegoat a company","created_at":"2026-07-20T11:52:44Z","created_at_i":1784548364,"objectID":"48977493","parent_id":48973969,"story_id":48973293,"story_title":"The Anti-Palantir Manifesto","story_url":"https://nonogra.ph/the-anti-palantir-manifesto-07-20-2026","updated_at":"2026-07-20T11:56:25Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"porridgeraisin"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["fde","palantir"],"value":"In the classic FDE model palantir pioneered, one of the main features was that you would use your learnings from one customer and integrate that back into your in house product, so that similar customers are serviced for cheaper later on.
With AI coding agents FDEs are now everywhere. One because they can demand a higher salary due to simply doing more due to AI. And two, because AI really accelerates the whole bespoke solution implementation thing. However, from what I hear, none of the actual "integrate that back into your in house platform" stuff is actually happening. So it's a tiny bit of a farce."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-deployed-engineers"}},"_tags":["comment","author_porridgeraisin","story_48900432"],"author":"porridgeraisin","comment_text":"In the classic FDE model palantir pioneered, one of the main features was that you would use your learnings from one customer and integrate that back into your in house product, so that similar customers are serviced for cheaper later on.
With AI coding agents FDEs are now everywhere. One because they can demand a higher salary due to simply doing more due to AI. And two, because AI really accelerates the whole bespoke solution implementation thing. However, from what I hear, none of the actual "integrate that back into your in house platform" stuff is actually happening. So it's a tiny bit of a farce.","created_at":"2026-07-14T06:59:27Z","created_at_i":1784012367,"objectID":"48903150","parent_id":48900432,"story_id":48900432,"story_title":"What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)","story_url":"https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/forward-deployed-engineers","updated_at":"2026-07-15T05:58:34Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"idid"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["fde","palantir"],"value":"Speckle | Head of Delivery | London (hybrid; UK-based) | Full-time | \u00a3120\u2013140k base + variable (OTE ~\u00a3160k) + meaningful equity
Speckle is the open-source platform that makes 3D/AEC design data accessible, trustworthy, and queryable across every tool in the stack - Revit, Rhino, IFC, ACC and more. We've just launched Speckle Intelligence: ask your project models anything, trust the answer, and generate client-ready deliverables in minutes. 23 people, open-source core, enterprise tier on top, post-Series A. Repo: github.com/specklesystems
We're hiring our first Head of Delivery to own the enterprise post-sale motion: turning pilots with general contractors, owners, and large service providers into expanded production deployments. Forward-deployed role (think Palantir FDE, not SaaS customer success) - you sit inside the customer's real decision problem, make "trust the answer, take the action" true on their actual data, and feed what you learn back into product. We measure impact and not closed ticket counts.
Good fit if you've delivered technical/data products into heavy industry (AEC, construction tech, infra, or similar) and can read an enterprise's problem without a spec. AEC background a strong plus, not required. Comfortable with messy data and ambiguous orgs.
Apply: d@speckle.systems"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"}},"_tags":["comment","author_idid","story_48357725"],"author":"idid","comment_text":"Speckle | Head of Delivery | London (hybrid; UK-based) | Full-time | \u00a3120\u2013140k base + variable (OTE ~\u00a3160k) + meaningful equity
Speckle is the open-source platform that makes 3D/AEC design data accessible, trustworthy, and queryable across every tool in the stack - Revit, Rhino, IFC, ACC and more. We've just launched Speckle Intelligence: ask your project models anything, trust the answer, and generate client-ready deliverables in minutes. 23 people, open-source core, enterprise tier on top, post-Series A. Repo: github.com/specklesystems
We're hiring our first Head of Delivery to own the enterprise post-sale motion: turning pilots with general contractors, owners, and large service providers into expanded production deployments. Forward-deployed role (think Palantir FDE, not SaaS customer success) - you sit inside the customer's real decision problem, make "trust the answer, take the action" true on their actual data, and feed what you learn back into product. We measure impact and not closed ticket counts.
Good fit if you've delivered technical/data products into heavy industry (AEC, construction tech, infra, or similar) and can read an enterprise's problem without a spec. AEC background a strong plus, not required. Comfortable with messy data and ambiguous orgs.
Apply: d@speckle.systems","created_at":"2026-06-01T19:14:21Z","created_at_i":1780341261,"objectID":"48361294","parent_id":48357725,"story_id":48357725,"story_title":"Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)","updated_at":"2026-06-01T19:19:21Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"keeda"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["fde","palantir"],"value":"The Forward Deployed Engineer role, as envisioned by Palantir, is qualitatively different from the other roles like partner engineers or solution architects, and I think it will be critical for enterprise AI adoption. I found this blog from an ex-Palantir FDE eye-opening on the sort of work they do: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
Note that many of the hurdles they overcome are not technical, they are political, bureaucratic, and organizational. TFA overlooks this key piece.
The role seems to require a very high-agency mindset, involving navigating departmental boundaries, regulations, access controls, bureaucracies and organizational politics to break down barriers like data silos (which is critical because inability to connect to data silos has been flagged as a recurring issue for agent effectiveness.)
In a sense, they are air-dropped into potentially hostile organizational dynamics and told to achieve measurable outcomes. The military connotations are a bit much, but better than "commandos" I suppose. I suspect Palantir's moat is more than its technology, it's also an operational model based on this insight into organizational psychology.
The reason I think FDEs will be critical for AI adoption is because the true impact of AI will be in re-organizing everything around AI entirely. As has been discussed on HN umpteen times, individual productivity gains do not translate well to overall productivity gains, largely because most of the time is still spent in meetings trying to figure out what to do. I call this "Conway Overhead" after Conways Law, because it is an unavoidable cost of coordinating across large org charts.
But if one AI-assisted person can do the work of an entire team or two, things change qualitatively. Today, a big change in some other team's code entails a bunch of meetings only for them to put something on their roadmap two quarters down. Tomorrow, a couple of AI-assisted senior engineers discuss over Slack and one of them merges the PR the next day.
This is a drastic change! A linear reduction in the lower levels of the org-chart causes a super-linear reduction in the heirarchy and the corresponding overhead, because a number of roles like program managers exist purely to manage this overhead. Reorganizing things will likely require refactoring the whole org, which will require navigating cultural issues, including AI-resistance... because let's face it, this means job cuts. FDE's will soon be operating in even more hostile territories."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer"},"story_url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"partial","matchedWords":["fde"],"value":"https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/fde-optional-ai-flywheel-spin/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_keeda","story_47951082"],"author":"keeda","comment_text":"The Forward Deployed Engineer role, as envisioned by Palantir, is qualitatively different from the other roles like partner engineers or solution architects, and I think it will be critical for enterprise AI adoption. I found this blog from an ex-Palantir FDE eye-opening on the sort of work they do: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir
Note that many of the hurdles they overcome are not technical, they are political, bureaucratic, and organizational. TFA overlooks this key piece.
The role seems to require a very high-agency mindset, involving navigating departmental boundaries, regulations, access controls, bureaucracies and organizational politics to break down barriers like data silos (which is critical because inability to connect to data silos has been flagged as a recurring issue for agent effectiveness.)
In a sense, they are air-dropped into potentially hostile organizational dynamics and told to achieve measurable outcomes. The military connotations are a bit much, but better than "commandos" I suppose. I suspect Palantir's moat is more than its technology, it's also an operational model based on this insight into organizational psychology.
The reason I think FDEs will be critical for AI adoption is because the true impact of AI will be in re-organizing everything around AI entirely. As has been discussed on HN umpteen times, individual productivity gains do not translate well to overall productivity gains, largely because most of the time is still spent in meetings trying to figure out what to do. I call this "Conway Overhead" after Conways Law, because it is an unavoidable cost of coordinating across large org charts.
But if one AI-assisted person can do the work of an entire team or two, things change qualitatively. Today, a big change in some other team's code entails a bunch of meetings only for them to put something on their roadmap two quarters down. Tomorrow, a couple of AI-assisted senior engineers discuss over Slack and one of them merges the PR the next day.
This is a drastic change! A linear reduction in the lower levels of the org-chart causes a super-linear reduction in the heirarchy and the corresponding overhead, because a number of roles like program managers exist purely to manage this overhead. Reorganizing things will likely require refactoring the whole org, which will require navigating cultural issues, including AI-resistance... because let's face it, this means job cuts. FDE's will soon be operating in even more hostile territories.","created_at":"2026-04-29T19:58:07Z","created_at_i":1777492687,"objectID":"47953694","parent_id":47951082,"story_id":47951082,"story_title":"Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer","story_url":"https://www.hfsresearch.com/research/fde-optional-ai-flywheel-spin/","updated_at":"2026-04-29T20:14:49Z"}],"hitsPerPage":5,"nbHits":54,"nbPages":11,"page":0,"params":"query=FDE+Palantir&hitsPerPage=5&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":13,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":1,"roundTrip":23},"afterFetch":{"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":1,"total":1},"total":3},"total":3},"fetch":{"query":7,"scanning":1,"total":9},"total":13},"query":"FDE Palantir","serverTimeMS":15}