Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
A role, invented at Palantir and adopted across the AI industry, that embeds an engineer inside a customer's operation to scope real workflows, build working prototypes on real data in days, prove value with evals, and feed learnings back to the product. Shorthand for the working style this book aims to teach (see Chapter 14).
Want the full picture? This term comes from GenAI for Business, a complete free book on generative AI strategy and implementation by Prof. Shubin Yu (HEC Paris).