The Palantir job that grows startup founders

Business Insider

3 days ago

Palantir, the government-focused software giant run by Alex Karp, has emerged as one of tech's biggest talent factories. One role in particular, the Forward Deployed Software Engineer, is churning out our startup founders.
Many Palantir alumni -turned-founders got their start in the role at the company — like Trae Stephens and Matt Grimm, two members of defense tech giant Anduril's founding team.
When she was a college student at Harvard University, Lisa Vo wasn't interested in typical software engineering internships and jobs where she'd spend her time writing backend code in a quiet office.
A position as a Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE), however, promised her something different.
During her time as an FDSE and intern at Palantir, Vo worked directly with the company's clients and enjoyed a high level of autonomy when trying out different solutions and settling on the best possible fix. She said the job gave her a rare experience in software engineering: the chance to interact directly with people and make an impact.
"For someone who enjoys software engineering not just as a practice but as a tool to work on interesting problems and to be able to make an impact, that was a perfect training because you got to marry the very fast-paced, evolving priorities of working for a client, with working on interesting and ever-changing issues," she told Business Insider.
Vo spent just over a year total at Palantir before quitting to become a founder, and she's launched five startups since 2019. Her latest project, a dating app called LoveJack, where users select five words, launched in London in May with pre-seed funding from Harvard AI Institute founder Karim Lakhani.
Vo said that being a FDSE fast-tracked the skills she needed to learn to run a startup successfully.
"It's definitely founder preparation bootcamp," she said. "As a founder, you have to talk to investors, land partnerships, and be outward-facing, but you also have to put your head down, build a product, code, and be inward-facing. It's the same dynamic with being a Forward Deployed Engineer."
On the computer and on the front lines
Like any other company, Palantir has traditional software engineers who work behind the scenes on product development and infrastructure — they're referred to as "Devs."
But Forward Deployed Software Engineers —also known internally as "Deltas" — are meant to be the tip of the spear. In addition to using their computer engineering skills, they embed directly with Palantir's clients — which means government agencies like ICE and the U.S. Army as well as large companies including United Airlines and General Mills — to implement and adapt Palantir's software and tools in real time.
"You're there to engage with a hard problem and solve it with deep customer empathy and lots of ingenuity," said Barry McCardel, a former FDSE who went on to co-found the data workspace startup Hex with two other Palantir alums, one of whom was also a FDSE.
McCardel told Business Insider that when embedding with a client, FDSEs were expected to iterate quickly and find creative ways to solve problems.
"That dynamic is what you ended up doing when you're creating a new product as a founder," he said. "So many of the things you worked on didn't work, but that was okay, which is similar to the venture and startup mindset."
Palantir's practice of embedding engineers directly with clients to solve problems eventually evolved into a core company ethos known as "Forward Deployed" — which essentially prioritizes speed and efficiency, taking definitive action, and working hand-in-hand with clients to see and solve problems up close.
Although Forward Deployed Software Engineers are perhaps the most well known, Palantir has other forward-deployed teams throughout the organization, including a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineering team, also known as the Baseline team, that embeds with clients to provide support for the products FDSEs build.
Gary Lin, co-founder and CEO of enterprise startup Explo, worked as an FDSE at Palantir from 2017 to 2019. He described the job as one where you needed to "move fast and break things" in order to succeed — and that it wasn't always important to have a perfect, polished solution in order to succeed. You just needed to give your client something that worked well, quickly, he said.
"Our goal was, 'What does it take to win with respect to the client?'," he said. "We were building faster to meet timelines, and that made our priorities slightly different."
From Forward Deployed to founder
Representatives for Palantir did not respond to a request for comment for this story, so it's unclear exactly how many FDSEs the company has hired since the firm was founded in 2003 or how many currently work there. There are around 700 LinkedIn profiles that list themselves as founders and say that Palantir was their former employer.
For Lin, being embedded with clients gave engineers a chance to practice translating vague customer feedback into workable software, which is a skill that's proven essential in his current role leading a startup.
"Forward Deployed Engineers will actually build software themselves and parse signal to noise what a customer is saying and figure out what's doable and reasonable," he said. "The exposure they get to the business side teaches you the tradeoffs between business development and product development, and as a founder you lean when it's okay to cut corners from an engineering perspective, and vice versa."
Eliot Hodges, CEO at fintech startup Anduin, was an FDSE from 2012-2014. He remembers a relentless focus on outcome and impact for the client, and those values have stuck with him more than a decade later, now that he's running a startup of his own.
"The idea was to bring in really ambitious, smart grads out of college and set them loose to be entrepreneurial, technical people to go out and pursue their own hypotheses," he said, adding that unlike a traditional role at a consulting firm, forward deployed engineers had to have not only top engineering chops, but also the expectation to set up a solution — rather than just make a recommendation.
"Why go to McKinsey spending weeks building a deck that's not going to change an outcome and move the needle and might just sit on someone's desk?"