We help you pick the right ones, and we are not one of them.

What the role actually is

• Inside your team, not on a parallel delivery track. Same repository, same reviews, same on-call where it applies.
• Owns an outcome, not a ticket queue. The measure is whether it works in production and somebody uses it.
• Changes the plan when the problem turns out to be different, as it generally does. An engineer who cannot renegotiate what is being built is a contractor with a better title.
• Leaves your engineers able to maintain it, because it was written beside them rather than handed over.

The questions worth putting to a provider

• What did you talk your last client out of? A provider who has never argued a customer down to a smaller build has been taking instructions, which is the job they are claiming not to do.
• May we speak to a reference you did not select? Any firm can produce three satisfied names. The informative conversation is about the engagement that went badly.
• Who owned the code six months after you left? If the answer is still the provider, what was bought was a dependency rather than a capability.
• Who will actually be at the standup? The common disappointment is a senior name on the proposal and two junior engineers on the daily call.
• Will you tell us no? The whole value of the model is renegotiating the plan, and a provider who agrees with everything during the sale will agree with everything afterwards.

What you may need instead

• A consultancy, if you need the analysis and have the team to build. The recommendation is often right and almost never sufficient.
• An agency, if the scope is genuinely known. Fixed scope works — until it turns out you specified the wrong thing.
• Staff augmentation, if you have the senior context to direct it. It is much cheaper than forward deployed work.
• A single permanent hire. This is the recommendation we make most often, and we have no delivery practice that would prefer a different answer.

What you get

• 01

  A ranked shortlist with the reasoning — and the ones we rejected, with why.

• 02

  A read on each provider's real seniority, not the seniority in the proposal.

• 03

  The questions to ask in your final conversation, and the answers that should worry you.

• 04

  A straight verdict on whether you should be buying this at all.

Questions

What is a forward deployed engineer?

A senior software engineer who works inside a customer's organisation — their codebase, their team, their production systems — building and deploying software there rather than delivering it from outside. The role was named at Palantir and is now common at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Salesforce. The defining feature is accountability for the outcome in the customer's environment, not delivery against a scope.

How is a forward deployed engineer different from a software engineer?

A software engineer builds a product for users they usually do not meet. A forward deployed engineer builds for one customer, inside that customer's systems, and is expected to change what is being built when the problem turns out to be different. It is a distinct job — part engineering, part product, part figuring out what the business actually needs.

How do you evaluate a forward deployed engineer or provider?

By what they have declined, who owned the code after they left, and whether the seniority in the proposal is the seniority that shows up. We speak to references the provider did not select, and we read whatever code we are given access to. The single most predictive question is what they talked a previous client out of building.

Do you supply forward deployed engineers yourselves?

No, and that is deliberate. We assess them for you and take no fee from whoever is chosen. A firm that both recommends and supplies is not giving you a recommendation, it is giving you a proposal.

Is this the same as staff augmentation or outsourcing?

No. Staff augmentation supplies engineering capacity for someone else to direct. Forward deployed engineering is supposed to supply the judgment as well — deciding what to build is part of the job. A great deal of what is currently sold as the second is the first with a new title, which is why the assessment is worth doing.

Are you hiring forward deployed engineers?

This is not a jobs page. nac helps companies choose forward deployed engineers and providers; we do not employ or place them. If you are an engineer and want to be on our radar, write to us anyway — we read everything.

Track record

Thirteen years of buying, building and assessing engineering work across 21 companies — payments infrastructure, decentralised finance, aviation and automotive. We have been on both sides of this table.

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