Everyone Is Afraid of Missing a Train That Isn't Coming

“Hi Igor, came across your profile… we’re building the future of [something]… looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to own deployments end-to-end”. Same message 3-4 times per week. Recruiters sound as if their hair is on fire. The comp is always there in the second paragraph. It’s usually very good.

It’s a stampede. FDE job postings were up 700+% in April 2026 vs previous year. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft and others are spending billions to hire people for a job that did not exist 24 months ago. AI companies and startups are suddenly certain they need engineers embedded in the customer’s building. Enterprises are building FDE-like teams under pressure from Wall Street to deliver ROI on AI spend that failed to move the needle. The rest are just copying.

Palantir deployed their top-tier engineers with their biggest customers and called it FDE. 54% of Palantir’s revenue comes from government - DoD, intel agencies. They have complex, often air-gapped systems, classified requirements. They cannot even tell you what they need. Someone has to go inside and find out, dig deep into the systems, understand integration points with Palantir’s technology, and feed what they learn back to product teams. On Palantir’s books, it’s not COGS, it’s R&D. The economics only work with whale accounts and a platform strong enough to absorb field learnings so later deployments require fewer people.

But I have seen it before. Back in the mid-2010s everyone got obsessed with Google’s microservices architecture. I saw a 3-person startup running 70 microservices. Everyone was trying to solve Google’s problem using Google’s solution. But they did not have Google’s problems. Those companies became who they are not, by imitation. They switched attention from their product to their infrastructure. They spent more time on self-inflicted wounds of networking, deployment synchronization than ever before. The time they did not spend on the product itself.

Same pattern with Kubernetes, Kafka, Hadoop. Beautiful ideas, great solutions for complex problems. Yet most adopters did not have those problems. This is classic “everyone is afraid of missing the train”. Now I see the same pattern with FDE. It solved Palantir’s problem but that does not mean it is a good solution for a small startup whose product is a chat window over a spreadsheet. Feels like “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” kind of thing.

Most current postings are re-labeled sales/solutions engineers, implementation specialists, or generalist “applied AI” roles with customer travel. How do I respond to those emails? “No, thank you” of course. The pay is usually great. But what happens when the winds change? Managers realize that FDEs make the bottom line really heavy, and it’s harder to justify what they added to the top. Career path becomes vague. Half consultant, half project manager, an engineer somewhere in what’s left. You don’t own a product. You own a relationship, and a footprint you’re paid to widen. And when this trend crests, you don’t walk away as an engineer who leveled up. You walk away as a deployment specialist for a thing that stopped needing you.

The platform is crowded and loud. But I don’t see a train.