Presented at AI Engineer. Finance used to be bottlenecked on producing content. It is now bottlenecked on verifying it. An analyst who once spent the day building a model now spends it checking whether a machine’s output can be defended to a client, a committee, or a regulator. ...
Presented at AI Engineer. Most companies hire forward deployed engineers as an extension of go-to-market: a technical body to keep a large account happy. That’s the wrong frame. FDE is a product strategy. The job is to find the real problem, ship the smallest thing that solves it, and turn what you learned into leverage for the product. ...
Part of Lenny Rachitsky’s “The AI-Native Product Manager” free workshop series on Maven. Most products fail not because of bad engineering, but because teams build the wrong thing. They either overbuild features nobody asked for or underbuild solutions that miss the real problem. Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the antidote. What is FDE? Forward Deployed Engineering is a methodology where technical teams embed directly with customers to witness how software meets reality. Instead of building from assumptions, FDEs develop customer instinct by being in the field — watching real users interact with real products under real conditions. ...
I joined Joe Reis on The Joe Reis Show to talk about open source communities — what makes them strong, what causes them to stall, and what contributing to a project like Apache Parquet actually looks like from the inside. The conversation also covers LLMs and AI, and where they do and don’t change the fundamentals of data engineering work. Link YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts
Tell us about your background Throughout my career, I have dedicated myself to creating tools, products, and technologies that help people effectively utilize their data. My passion lies in developing products that enable users to efficiently and scalably gain maximum value from their data. My journey in understanding the intricacies of data and its potential began at Palantir Technologies, where I began working on search and indexing products. As data volumes grew, I focused my efforts on solving some of Palantir customers’ core problems across the financial and defense verticals before leading customer focused compute teams. After Palantir, I served as CTO at Veraset, a cloud-based data-as-a-service company. Veraset delivered high-quality, large scale data to a number of enterprises and grew to 15M ARR before being acquired. Following this, I joined Citadel Investment Group as the Head of Business Engineering of Ashler. In that role, I managed crucial data operations, including overseeing data pipelines, investment platforms, data lakes, and the software and data engineering teams responsible for them. ...