Meet the a16z Forward Deployed Engineer Fellows
The 65 fellows we've selected to join the inaugural cohort
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We are excited to announce the fellows who will be part of the inaugural a16z Forward Deployed Engineer Fellowship, an 8-week cohort of FDEs and Applied AI leaders at the forefront of deploying AI into real-world enterprises.
We received thousands of applications from talented people around the world. Today, we’re thrilled to share more about the inaugural cohort of 65 fellows who are leading FDE at companies like OpenAI, Mistral, Cognition, HappyRobot, Poetic, and Decagon.
Many are Palantir alumni who are now founding members of companies pioneering the FDE playbook like Barry McCardel from Hex, Kevin Bai at Anthropic, Isa Gomez from OpenAI, Senta Knuth from ElevenLabs, and Vinoo Ganesh from Kepler.
Some are FDE architects behind top high-growth startups like Luv Kothari from Snowflake, Perry Ha from Decagon, Bo Sun at Notion, Leo Mehr at Ramp, Niko Grupen at Harvey, and Anitej Biradir from ElevenLabs.
Others are the next generation of FDE builders already deploying live like Priya Khandelwal from Nixo, Tom Kimbrell from Stuut, Lucas Kiefer from Strala, Kian Fattahy from Saronic, Chelsey Fang from Pylon, Amy Jin from Decagon, Rohan Ramani from Netic, Jakub Hojsan from Exa, and Mariano Pennini from Spade.
Congratulations and welcome, a16z Forward Deployed Engineer Fellows!
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Congratulations to everyone selected for the inaugural cohort. What makes this group especially interesting is the combination of people who helped shape the original FDE model, leaders now adapting it for frontier and vertical AI companies, and the next generation building the playbook in real time.
Forward-deployed engineering is still a young field outside Palantir, so creating a community where practitioners can compare deployment patterns, failures, organizational models, and lessons from the field could have an impact well beyond this first cohort.
I have been studying the same evolution and recently published Forward Deployed AI Engineering: A Working Guide to the Hottest Job in Software:
https://www.amazon.com/Forward-Deployed-AI-Engineering-Software/dp/B0H3VKKG38/
Congratulations again to the fellows and the team behind the program.