What a Forward Deployed Engineer is — and does for customers
“Forward deployed engineer” is a role, not a job title you will see on most org charts. It describes an engineer who works from inside a customer’s operation rather than from behind a product roadmap — learning how the work actually moves, fixing the process where it breaks, and building software against that real environment only where it clearly pays off, in close contact with the people who use it every day.
Embedded, not outsourced
At Intellisolve, the Fractional Forward Deployed Engineer works directly with your ops and IT teams, on the system of record you already run — NetSuite or Epicor, Procore or Autodesk Construction Cloud, McLeod or MercuryGate — and on the documents that never quite make it into those systems cleanly. The work is not a generic platform rollout. It is scoped to one of three frameworks, built on Vertex AI, Document AI, BigQuery, and Gemini.
What that looks like day to day
- Sitting with the actual document pile (POs, bid packages, BOLs) rather than a vendor sample deck
- Building Document AI and Gemini extraction for those document types, with confidence scores a human can refuse
- Standing up the GCP project, IAM, and the write path into the system of record — API, staging table, or CSV, whichever is honest
- Leaving the contractual step (post the order, publish the RFI, bill the accessorial) with a named person at your company
Why the model fits industrial operations and supply chain
Most software vendors sell a seat and leave implementation to a team you do not have. Enterprise SIs size the SOW for someone else. A forward-deployed model puts the engineer inside the operation — so the work reflects how orders, bids, or invoices actually move. No rip-and-replace. Your team stays in charge of the system, and a person on your team approves every change.
Each retainer comes with one named engineer working alongside your team, 10–12 hours a week. Success looks like your people running the new workflow with confidence and knowing how to change it. Every retainer starts with the $4,000 Operations & Data Readiness Audit, which is credited toward the $14,000/month retainer if you continue.