I ran Palantir’s rotational program for forward-deployed engineering. Here’s what rivals get wrong about FDEs.

Palantir alum Vinoo Ganesh said some companies were mistaking FDEs for "sales engineers." Vinoo Ganesh Vinoo Ganesh led Palantir's program for staffers to try forward-deployed engineering in the 2010s. FDE programs are all the rage at companies from OpenAI to Google. He said that many companies are misinterpreting FDEs as "sales engineers." This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vinoo Ganesh, the 34-year-old CEO of Kepler. He spent over six years at Palantir in the 2010s and…