Is FDE just consulting with a new title?

Well… sometimes it is.

People have been asking this question ever since the role first popped up at Palantir.

It's louder than ever now.

Accenture, NTT DATA, BCG X and Deloitte all hire Forward Deployed Engineers in Europe. In May 2026 OpenAI bought Tomoro, a UK consultancy with about 150 FDEs, and Anthropic started a services firm with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs. The title is everywhere, and it doesn't mean the same thing everywhere.

In this article you'll find answers to:

• The difference between the FDE role and consulting
• How to spot a consulting job with an FDE title

You can't tell the jobs apart by the title. You can by asking two simple questions:

1. Does your company make money from your hours?
2. When you leave a customer, does your company keep something it can sell again?

Before we get to them, it helps to see why people mix the two roles up in the first place.

Why people mix them up

On a normal day an FDE and a technical consultant can look the same. You get access to the customer's data, which usually means negotiating with whoever owns it. You build pipelines, deploy and configure software, and debug it when it breaks.

How much real code you write depends on the company. At many places most of it is data transformation and platform configuration. At others, like Ramp, FDEs mostly build features that ship in the core product.

Even the people who started the role admit the overlap. Bob McGrew, an early Palantir executive, was asked why "it's just consulting" is wrong. He said: "I think there's actually a real risk that it's right." Nabeel Qureshi, an FDE at Palantir for eight years, wrote that in 2016, calling Palantir a services company was "not totally off the mark."¹

So the daily work doesn't settle it. The business around the work does.

1. Does your company make money from your hours?

Follow the money. Look at how your company charges the customer for your work.

If the customer pays for your time, by the hour, the day or the project, and your company makes a margin on it, you're in consulting territory.

If your company absorbs your cost as an investment to win and grow the product deal, you're in FDE territory. Palantir gives pilots away at no or low cost. Its CTO, Shyam Sankar, says that absorbing the cost gives them "a radical incentive" to make deployment cheaper. Barry McCardel, who worked in Palantir's deployment teams before founding Hex, calls it "R&D, not COGS."²

FDEs use the same test themselves. The top answer in a Reddit thread on this exact question came from someone whose title is literally "FDE - Consultant": "Does it literally bill engineer hours? Or is there a product it sells at a flat rate?"³

Grow the hours or shrink them

This matters because the way your hours are paid for decides what your company wants from you.

A consultant's incentive is to grow the hours. The more work the customer needs, the more revenue comes in. NTT DATA's London FDE role is measured partly on utilization, the share of your hours that get billed.

An FDE's incentive is to shrink the hours. Every custom fix should become part of the product, so the next deployment needs less of you.

That doesn't mean FDEs want to leave the customer. Palantir's Ted Mabrey says they "yearn for scope creep."⁴ The account should grow while the custom work shrinks. Decagon says turning its FDE work into product cut custom engineering per agent by 80%.

But payment alone doesn't settle it. A company can absorb your cost and still never turn your work into product. So the second question is: what stays behind when you leave?

2. When you leave, what does your company keep?

When a consultant finishes, what they built belongs to the client. The next client mostly starts from scratch.

When an FDE finishes, something should stay with their own company: a feature, a tool or a pattern it can sell to the next customer.

A lot of Palantir's product started this way. Foundry and Workshop grew out of hacks FDEs kept rebuilding for different customers. At OpenAI, FDE work for one voice customer improved the Realtime API for everyone. One senior FDE on Reddit built the first version of a feature for customers, and it has "now transitioned over to a team to build and maintain long term."

Often the FDE builds the quick version and a product team turns it into something general. That's fine. What matters is that it happens.

If nothing you build ever reaches the product, you're implementing software for customers, whatever your title says.

Four kinds of jobs

Put the two questions together and you get four kinds of jobs.

Two of these need a word of explanation. "Vendor implementation" is when a software company sends you to set up its product for each customer, but nothing you learn changes the product. "Hybrid" is a services firm that bills for your time but also builds its own product from the work.

Europe has all four. n8n in Berlin avoids "open-ended professional services work" and runs five-day engagements. ElevenLabs says its FDEs "sit on the product team." JetBrains puts its FDEs in Professional Services and wants "a consultant at heart." Accenture's FDE ad says "This is not a consulting role," at a consulting firm.

None of these is wrong. They're different jobs. The trouble starts when you sign up for one and get the other.

Questions to ask a recruiter or hiring manager

Job ads won't tell you which box a role is in. These questions will. A recruiter can usually answer 2 and 4. Save the rest for the hiring manager or an FDE on the team.

1. How is FDE work sold to customers? Is it a separate services contract, or part of the product deal? Good sign: it's part of the product deal.
2. How is success measured in this role? Good sign: how much customers use the product and whether they renew. Warning sign: billable hours.
3. Can you give me an example of something an FDE built that's now part of the product? Who owns it today? Good sign: a real example with a team that owns it. Warning sign: "we pass on a lot of feedback."
4. Who does the FDE team report to? Good sign: product or engineering. Warning sign: services or delivery.
5. Will I write code in the main product, or mostly set the product up for each customer? Good sign: at least some of your code goes into the main product.

So, is FDE just consulting with a new title?

Sometimes. It is when your hours are the product.

Before you take one, ask whether your company makes money from your hours, and what stays behind when you leave. If your company absorbs your cost and your work ends up in the product, you're an FDE. If the customer pays for your time and your work stays with them, you're a consultant with a newer title.

Notes

1. He goes on to say that by 2024 the label was "deeply off the mark," pointing to Palantir's 80% gross margins against Accenture's 32%.

2. COGS means cost of goods sold, the direct cost of delivering what a customer bought. Calling deployment R&D means treating it as an investment in the product rather than a cost of each sale.

3. Reddit answers are anonymous, so take the job title on trust. What makes this one worth quoting is that it was the most upvoted answer, from someone whose official title contains both words.

4. Mabrey runs Palantir's commercial business, so this is the company's view of its own FDEs, not an outside one.