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 — building and adapting software against a real environment, in close contact with the people who use it every day.
Embedded, not outsourced
At Intellisolve, the Fractional Forward Deployed AI 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 mid-market industrial operations
Most AI 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 engineering hours inside the operation — so the work reflects how orders, bids, or invoices actually move. No rip-and-replace. No 24/7 helpdesk pretending we are your MSP.
Capacity is 10–12 hours a week per retainer, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:00pm EST. That constraint is the product, not a footnote.