Forward Deployed Engineering
Senior engineers embedded in your environment, owning AI and software systems from first commit to production.
Talk to an engineerWhat is a forward deployed engineer?
A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a senior software engineer embedded in a client's environment who owns building and running a system through production. A consultant delivers recommendations and a roadmap. An FDE delivers the working system and stays accountable for it once it is live.
Demand for the model is rising quickly: TechCrunch calls forward deployed engineers the AI industry's latest talent obsession.
How an engagement works
Embed
Our engineers join your team, your tools, and your standups. We learn the systems, data, and constraints first-hand instead of from a slide deck.
Build
We ship working increments against real use cases such as agents, retrieval pipelines, and integrations, with evaluations from day one.
Production
We deploy, monitor, and run what we build, with observability and guardrails, until it holds up under real traffic.
Handoff
Your team takes ownership with runbooks, documentation, and paired onboarding. We stay as long as you need us, or step back.
Technology focus
Agentic orchestration
Multi-step agents and tool use that complete real workflows reliably.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Grounded, cited answers over your own content and data.
Evaluations
Test suites that measure quality before and after every change.
Observability and guardrails
Tracing, monitoring, and safety controls for systems that run unattended.
Data and API integration
Connecting models to the systems of record your business already runs on.
Cloud
Secure, scalable deployment on the cloud platform you already use.
Proof: from pilot to production
AI knowledge platform for a global cruise line
A cruise line needed an AI knowledge base its business teams could govern in production. Makai delivered a production-ready platform with real-time editorial control that improved conversational AI response quality by 25%.
Read the case studyAI site search for a global cruise line
Makai designed and deployed an AI-powered discovery engine in production on the client's global web properties, replacing lists of links with cited, interactive answers.
Read the case studyReady to put engineers inside your AI initiative?
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you how an embedded team would get it into production.
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