CLIENT-FACING ROLES

FDE vs deployment strategist

Quick answer

The deployment strategist is Palantir's client-side partner to the FDE; the FDE is the engineer half of that pair.

	DEPLOYMENT STRATEGIST	FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER
MAIN OUTPUT	Client strategy and deployment planning	A working deployment inside one customer's systems
CLIENT TIME	Similar than an FDE	High: discovery, demos and handover every week
WRITES PRODUCTION CODE	Rarely	Yes
PAY	See FDE salary in India for bands by experience and city.

The default language of data, integrations and LLM tooling.

The language of the customer's data warehouse and application databases.

Designing a system inside someone else's constraints.