Forward-deployed engineering has become the most sought-after capability in enterprise AI — and one of the hardest roles on earth to hire. FDE as a service gives you the embedded engineer without the search: senior, outcome-accountable, and in your standups in about two weeks.
Industry analyses estimate only a few thousand forward-deployed engineers exist worldwide, while demand grew roughly tenfold in eighteen months as enterprises discovered that deployment — not models — is where AI initiatives stall. Frontier labs and data platforms dominate the talent market with total compensation commonly reported between $300,000 and $600,000+. The result: FDE job postings sit open for months while enterprise rollouts wait.
FDE as a service is the bridge. Corinth embeds senior engineers who do the forward-deployed job — inside your tools, your meetings, your environment — on a monthly engagement instead of a permanent search.
Before anyone embeds, we agree a one-page charter naming the outcomes the engineer is accountable for this quarter — reviewed monthly. It is the difference between forward-deployed engineering and renting hours.
Your Slack, your standups, your repositories, your security process. The engineer diagnoses from inside the building — where the real constraints live.
Weekly working demos of running software. Integration with legacy systems, data plumbing, security review, production access — the unglamorous work that makes AI actually operate.
Add engineers as rollouts grow, step down as they complete — and if you eventually land your own FDE hire, we onboard them and hand off cleanly. The seat never sits empty either way.
You closed the enterprise deal — now every customer needs integration work, and every FDE candidate takes the bigger offer. As your deployment partner, Corinth embeds with your customers to integrate, customize, and productionize your product, rollout after rollout.
A hired forward-deployed engineer commonly costs $300,000–$600,000+ in total compensation, takes months to find, and may leave. FDE as a service is a monthly engagement at a fraction of that loaded cost, can begin in roughly two weeks, and scales up or down with your rollout schedule. Exact pricing is scoped in writing after a short assessment.
No. Staff augmentation rents hours into your plan; you keep the outcome risk. A forward-deployed engineer owns outcomes: diagnosing the problem, proposing the build, shipping it, and being measured on whether it works in production. Every Corinth engagement runs under a written outcome charter reviewed monthly.
Yes — that is the deployment-partner model. For AI and software companies, Corinth engineers embed with your customers to handle integration, customization, security review, and productionization of your product, so every new enterprise deal doesn't require a new impossible hire.
Typically about two weeks from agreement to your first standup: enough time to define the outcome charter, meet the engineer, and set up access. You can keep any internal FDE search running in parallel — if you land the hire, we hand off cleanly.
Keep your search running if you like — we'll keep your rollouts shipping in the meantime.