Forward Deployed Engineering — Petrabytes
Forward Deployed Engineering

Your standup. Your Slack. Our engineer.

We don't send you a team and check in monthly. We sit next to yours.

FDE embeds experienced Petrabytes engineers directly inside your delivery organization. They attend your planning sessions, write code in your repos, and solve problems in real time — then leave your team stronger than they found it.

Not a Project. A Partnership.

Engineering Services hands you a platform. FDE builds one with you.

Some programs are too complex, too fast-moving, or too strategic for a scoped project. You don't need a vendor who delivers a thing and leaves. You need engineers who understand your architecture, your constraints, and your org — because they're in it, every day, for months.

That's what FDE is. Palantir invented the model. We brought it to enterprise data and AI.

"A traditional software engineer builds one capability for many customers. A Forward Deployed engineer enables many capabilities for one customer."
The Palantir model — adapted for enterprise data
What It Actually Looks Like

A Tuesday with your FDE engineer.

9:00 AM

Join your team's standup

Not a status call with a vendor. A standup with a teammate who knows what shipped yesterday and what's blocked today.

9:30 AM

Pair with your data engineer on a pipeline issue

A SCADA connector is dropping records during peak load. Your FDE debugs it live, fixes the buffer config, adds a monitoring alert.

11:00 AM

Architecture review with your platform team

You're evaluating two approaches for MCP integration. Your FDE has done this three times before — they walk through the trade-offs and recommend the pattern that scales.

1:00 PM

Ship a governance policy update

New RBAC rules for the AI search index. Your FDE writes the policy, tests it against edge cases, deploys it. Your security team reviews and approves.

3:00 PM

Knowledge transfer session

30 minutes teaching your junior engineer how the lineage tracking works. Not a training webinar — a whiteboard session based on the code they just shipped together.

4:30 PM

Sprint planning prep

Your FDE drafts technical specs for next sprint's stories, estimates complexity, flags dependencies. Ready for tomorrow's planning session.

Who We Embed

The engineer your team needs — not the one who was available.

Platform Engineers

Design and scale enterprise data platforms. They've built PIEScale environments and know where every configuration breaks under load.

Data Engineers

Pipelines, integrations, migrations, OSDU. They've moved petabytes of legacy data without losing a record — or a weekend.

AI Engineers

MCP servers, domain agents, enterprise search, RAG pipelines. They build AI that works on governed enterprise data, not demo datasets.

Cloud Architects

AWS, Azure, GCP, hybrid. Infrastructure automation, security hardening, cost optimization. They've seen your cloud bill and know where the waste is.

Integration Specialists

SCADA, historians, SAP, operational systems. They bridge the gap between IT infrastructure and the plant floor.

Domain Engineers

Petroleum engineering, process operations, industrial systems. They speak your engineers' language — not just your IT team's.

ES vs FDE

Two models. Different problems. Choose the right one.

Engineering Services

Hire us for a project.

  • Scoped deliverable with a start and end date
  • Petrabytes team delivers, your team receives
  • We own the project, you own the result
  • Knowledge transfer happens at handover
  • Best for: defined implementations
Forward Deployed Engineering

Hire us into your team.

  • Open-ended engagement, scales with your program
  • FDE engineers work inside your delivery org
  • Shared ownership — your code, your repos, your process
  • Knowledge transfer happens every sprint
  • Best for: strategic transformation programs
What Changes

Six months with an FDE engineer.

Delivery speed doubles

Technical bottlenecks disappear when experienced engineers make decisions in real time instead of waiting for a vendor response.

Your team levels up

Every sprint includes pairing, code review, and architecture discussions. Your junior engineers become seniors faster.

Fewer wrong turns

An FDE engineer who's built this platform five times knows which approaches fail at scale — before you invest three months in them.

No hiring risk

Add senior engineering capacity in weeks, not months. Scale up or down as the program evolves. No headcount paperwork.

Bridge to independence

The explicit goal is to make your team not need us anymore. FDE is a ramp, not a dependency.

Platform + people

FDE engineers know PIEScale inside out. Your team gets both the platform and the engineer who built it.

Need a defined project with a handover, not an embedded engineer?

If you have a clear scope, a fixed timeline, and a team ready to take ownership at the end — that's Engineering Services. Scoped projects, lean teams, production-ready deliverables.

Explore Engineering Services
Start the Conversation

Your hardest problem. Our best engineer.

Tell us what you're building, what's stuck, and what your team needs. We'll match the right FDE engineers and have a plan within a week.