Forward-Deployed Engineers
November 9, 2025
I’ve never worked at a software company, but my wife has. She has told me how sales normally works in B-to-B companies. Namely, there would be a sales pipeline with a junior sales person tasked to set up meetings, an account manager to demo and close the deal, and a sales engineer (SE) who was a technical bridge that helped with any complex questions about the product that couldn’t be handled by the sales team. This last role, of the sales engineer, is seeing a transformation largely thanks to Palantir which has introduced us to the term “forward-deployed engineer” or FDE.
Forward-deployed enginners are not confined to their offices (or homes for that matter). They act more like consultants and are deployed at the customer site in order to integrate the product. The job title has emerged as the complexities of AI implementation often requires heavy customization when used in an enterprise setting. So along with the demands for compute and power, AI also needs FDEs. As such, the demand for FDEs has skyrocketed 800% between January and September of this year (see chart below).
Some of the reasons reindustrialization has gained ground in recent years include:
Resilience & strategic sovereignty: Reducing dependence on distant, fragile supply chains protects against geopolitical shocks.
High-value job creation and spillovers: Manufacturing anchors higher R&D, local supply networks, and skills ecosystems.
Scale economies & innovation feedback loops: As manufacturing clusters rebuild, productivity accelerates via learning curves, backward linkages, and clustering effects.
Sustainability minded: A new wave of factories is being designed with clean energy, waste recycling, and circular inputs in mind, beneficial both environmentally and financially.
Financial leverage & incentive margins: State subsidies, tax credits, and co-investment models can tip returns for early movers.
Some of the industries and companies poised to benefit from this still nascent trend include: semiconductuctors and fabs as nations vie for chip sovereignty and AI dominance; advanced automation and robotics companies that support modern manufacturing; and regions specializing in upstream inputs (like rare earths and advanced metals). On the other hand, companies still focusing on offshoring and/or legacy distributed supply chains and those still utilizing low-tech manufacturing processes will likely suffer.
For investors, the opportunity lies with the companies taking advantage of the fundamental shift in how goods are produced, particularly by leveraging benefits being offered by governments to foster homegrown growth and secure innovation. Of course there may be short-term pain due to the capital intensity and time required to build factories, fiding and training skilled workers, facing higher fixed and variable costs, and managing potential retalliation from other countries through tariffs and/or trade barriers. Since we at Somar aren’t macro investors, we’ll continue looking at each company one-by-one and gauge how effectively or not it is managing this seizmic shift in production.
-Pedro Ramos