Palantir alum Vinoo Ganesh said some companies were mistaking FDEs for "sales engineers."
Vinoo Ganesh
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 later worked at Citadel. He's based in New York. It's been edited for length and clarity.Palantir had a program we called Project Frontline. The idea behind Frontline was: How do we take software engineers and expose them to life as a forward-deployed engineer?I actually went through a version of this before the program. I started off on the product development team, did a rotation that lasted for a long time as a forward-deployed engineer, then went back to the product development team.I was running the program for a good chunk of time. We had a bunch of people go through it. Some folks stayed as forward-deployed engineers; some rotated back to becoming software engineers.At the time, the state of the world was that forward-deployed engineers were moving really fast, and were very close to the customer. The software engineering team tended to be geographically — literally, some folks were in Palo Alto — culturally isolated from the urgency the FDE team had.The idea was: walk a mile in the other person's shoes.Palantir worked really hard to set all of these folks up for success. We would give them mentors. They would have two touch points: a forward-deployed engineering manager and a software engineering manager.People loved it. They'd be in corporate housing for a few months, displaced somewhere other than their home office. It's not like every FDE went through this program; it was a set of software engineers who expressed interest.We called it "business engineering" at Citadel. The goal was much more focused on internal portfolio managers and analysts. Palantir's FDEs are much more focused on customers external to the company. At Citadel, we were focused on folks internal to the organization.
