The FDE library
39 books hand-picked for Forward Deployed Engineers, shelved by skill, plus 9 courses and certifications. Books with a ribbon are the place to start. Pick one up to see why it's here.
The FDE role & Palantir-style deployment
What forward deployed engineering is, where it came from, and how the best teams run it.
3 books
Customer discovery & consulting
Finding the real problem, asking better questions and earning the trust of the people you serve.
5 books
Communication, writing & executive presence
Writing and presenting so busy people understand you, remember it and act on it.
5 books
Problem solving & decomposition
Breaking big, vague problems into parts you can reason about and act on.
5 books
Systems design & data engineering
Designing data systems and services that hold up in someone else's production environment.
5 books
AI engineering, LLMs, agents & evals
Building with LLMs in production: retrieval, agents, evals and the engineering around the model.
6 books
Software craft & debugging in unfamiliar codebases
Working in unfamiliar codebases: reading, debugging and changing code you didn't write.
5 books
Influence, negotiation & stakeholder management
Getting to yes with stakeholders, handling conflict and leading without authority.
5 books
Level up
Courses & certifications
Anthropic Academy
Free courses on building with Claude: API, tool use, MCP, and agent patterns. Core to AI-era FDE work.
OpenAI Academy
OpenAI's learning hub: workshops and guides on deploying models in real organizations.
DeepLearning.AI Short Courses
One-to-two hour courses on RAG, agents, evals, and fine-tuning. Fast ramp for customer-facing AI builds.
Hugging Face Agents Course
Hands-on, free course on building and deploying AI agents, with a certificate of completion.
Palantir Learn (Foundry & AIP)
Official training for Foundry and AIP, the platforms Palantir FDEs deploy every day.
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
The most requested cloud cert in FDE job posts. Proves you can design deployable systems in customer environments.
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
Senior-level architecture cert. Useful for FDE roles serving GCP-heavy enterprise customers.
Microsoft Azure AI Engineer Associate
Azure AI services, RAG, and responsible AI. Relevant for FDEs at Microsoft-ecosystem customers.
Databricks Generative AI Engineer Associate
Validates building LLM apps on enterprise data, which is exactly the last-mile work FDEs own.