Eugen Alpeza

Eugen Alpeza

CEO & Co-Founder @ Edra | ex-Palantir · 2w ago

If connecting agents to company data were enough, why are forward deployed engineers in such demand? Yannis Karamanlakis and I led forward deployed AI engineering at Palantir. Getting operator judgment into instructions software could follow was the hard part. Keeping those instructions current was an ongoing job. Much of what gets called FDE work today is an engineer acting as the interface between operators and agents. Companies are filling a product gap with engineering headcount. The people who own the process should have the tools to review, test, and update those instructions themselves, without an engineer translating every revision. I wrote about the product gap behind the FDE boom, and what comes after it.

Eugen Alpeza

CEO & Co-Founder @ Edra | ex-Palantir · 2w ago

I recently wrote about why I think the FDE boom is a product gap. On October 6, I’ll be at ICONIQ's first Builders Circle in New York sharing lessons from building Palantir’s Forward Deployed AI Engineering function, and how that experience shapes the work we’re doing today at Edra. With Anu Bharadwaj, we’ll talk about what it takes to build and scale the FDE model, what makes great FDEs, and how to turn what you learn in the field into product. If you’re building an FDE team, already doing the job, or just curious about the model, come join us. Link in the comments.

Eugen Alpeza

CEO & Co-Founder @ Edra | ex-Palantir · 5d ago

The response to “The FDE boom is a product gap” made it clear that a lot of people are wrestling with the same problem: agents don’t know how the business works, and the people who do have no easy way to teach them. I’m joining Grace Gong this Friday to get into the details. How do agents learn how a company actually works? And how can the people doing the work keep teaching them?