If you've read about how the big AI companies sell to large enterprises, you've probably run into the phrase forward deployed engineer. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all hiring them. Consulting firms are rebranding around them.
The idea behind the title is older and simpler than the hype suggests, and it's one of the most useful ways a business of any size can get technology work done.
Where the role came from
Palantir created the role in the mid-2000s. Its early customers had problems that didn't fit a standard product, and traditional consultants weren't solving them. So Palantir sent software engineers to work directly with the customer, inside the customer's environment, building whatever it took to make the system work in the real world.
Twenty years later, AI companies hit the same wall. A powerful model doesn't run a business process by itself. Someone has to understand the process, connect the systems, handle the exceptions, and get people to actually use the thing. OpenAI started building a forward deployed engineering team in late 2024, and Anthropic hires for the same kind of work, often under the title Applied AI Engineer.
What a forward deployed engineer actually does
A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who embeds with a customer and owns a problem from end to end:
- Learning how the work really happens, which is rarely how the process document says it happens.
- Scoping the fix with the people who will live with it.
- Building it — production software, inside the systems the business already runs.
- Staying until it works, including the training and adjustments that turn a working tool into a used one.
The difference from the usual options is ownership. A consultant hands you recommendations and leaves you to carry them out. A development agency builds to a spec, so it's only as good as the spec you were able to write. Off-the-shelf software does most of what you need and leaves your team doing the rest by hand.
A forward deployed engineer closes that gap, because the same person who understands the problem is the one writing the code.
Why the model works
In most businesses, the hard part of a technology project isn't the code. It's knowing what to build.
The problems that cost the most time tend to live between systems: the spreadsheet that feeds the report, the approval that lives in someone's inbox, the data that gets typed into two places, the history stranded in a system you just migrated away from. Nobody owns those gaps. Each vendor's product stops at its own edge, and no one inside the business has the time or technical depth to work across them.
An engineer who sits close to the work can see those gaps, and can fix them without asking you to replace everything you already own.
Why small businesses usually can't get one
The forward deployed engineers at AI companies serve large enterprise customers on large contracts. A small or mid-sized business is not who they're built for.
Hiring your own doesn't work well either. A full-time senior engineer is expensive, hard to recruit, and often underused. Most businesses under 100 employees have important technology problems, but not a full-time engineer's worth of them every week of the year.
So smaller businesses get stuck choosing between advice they can't act on and software that almost fits.
The small-business version
That's the gap Mosaic is built for. We work the way a forward deployed engineer does, sized for a small or mid-sized business:
- We start with the bottleneck, not the technology. We learn how your operation actually runs before recommending anything — and sometimes the right answer is a process change, not software.
- We build inside the stack you already have. Your ERP, your CRM, your document systems, your email. We connect them instead of replacing them.
- We stay through adoption. We train the people who will use what we build, because a tool nobody uses hasn't fixed anything.
- We bill hourly, for the time the problem takes. You don't need to fund a full-time role to get an engineer who knows your business.
In practice, that has looked like an archive for a manufacturer changing ERPs, so years of history weren't lost in the move. It has looked like one connected place for a law firm's documents, email, and practice management system. And it has looked like a cleaned-up CRM for a nonprofit changing how it sells, so leadership, finance, and sales could finally work from the same numbers.
Signs this is what you need
A forward deployed approach is a good fit when:
- The problem spans more than one system, and no single vendor will own it.
- You've tried off-the-shelf software and your team still works around it.
- You've received advice, but nobody has the time or skills to carry it out.
- You're moving between systems and can't afford to lose what the old one did well.
- You aren't sure whether you need a consultant, a developer, or a new product — you just know the process is harder than it should be.
If that sounds familiar, see how we approach Software & Automation and Advise, Educate & Lead, or tell us what's not working.