$ cd ~/hire/forward-deployed-engineer
The senior AI engineer your local market won’t let you hire.
So embed ours. A Forward-Deployed Engineer— the Palantir / OpenAI model, fractional — in your standups and your AWS account by Friday. Bedrock + AgentCore, senior, Mountain Time. No 9-month search, no recruiter fee.
The engineers you’d embed shipped these · Built in Lehi, Utah
# the-problem
You can’t hire a Forward-Deployed Engineer in Utah.
The labs that invented the role — OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir — hire every FDE in sight at $400k, in SF and NY. Silicon Slopes is left with three bad options.
You don’t need another headcount req. You need the work shipped. Embed a Forward-Deployed Engineer for the days you actually need one.
# capacity-tiers
Pick a capacity. Flat monthly.
Billed flat monthly, month-to-month. No hourly billing, no recruiting fee.
A senior FDE in your roadmap calls, code review, and AWS decisions. The cheapest way to stop shipping the wrong thing.
Hands on keyboard. Bedrock + AgentCore features land in your repo and your AWS account every sprint.
Your fractional Head of AI. Owns the agent architecture, evals, guardrails, and the cost line.
A dedicated senior FDE (or pod), full-time for a quarter or two. Hire them onto your payroll after — zero conversion fee.
# how-we-compare
The FDE you can hire vs. the ones you can’t.
| AppsTango FDE | A 9-month hire | A big-lab FDE | Offshore shop | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first commit | ✓~1 week | 6–9 months | If you’re a F500 | 2–3 weeks |
| Can you actually get one | ✓Yes — that’s the point | If your offer lands | No (logo-gated) | Yes, junior |
| AI / AWS depth | ✓Bedrock + AgentCore in prod | Hope they have it | Deep, their stack | Rare |
| Embedded in your account | ✓Your repo, your AWS, your standups | Full-time | Deploys their product | Handoffs + timezone gap |
| Cost shape | ✓Flat monthly, month-to-month | $280k+ loaded / yr | $400k+ or unavailable | Cheap rate, slow ship |
| Exit | ✓End any cycle · code is yours | Severance + culture hit | Enterprise contract | IP + offboarding friction |
# specializations
Three streams. Pick the one your roadmap needs.
Production agents, not demos
Amazon Bedrock + AgentCore Runtime, custom MCP servers, evals in CI, Bedrock Guardrails on every output. The 80/20 discipline: a state machine where a state machine works.
Well-Architected, ~50% cheaper
The AWS senior you can’t hire — CDK / Terraform in your GitHub org, cost guardrails with Slack alerts, ~50% lower cloud cost at launch from 100+ prior builds.
Your VPC. Your data. HIPAA.
For Utah healthtech and regulated teams: inference stays in your VPC, data never leaves, SOC 2 / HIPAA evidence built in. The AI capability your compliance team will actually sign off on.
# how-it-works
From call to standup in a week.
Free 30-min call
Zoom or our Lehi office. We find where you’re a senior engineer short.
Matched to a named FDE
A specific senior, AWS-certified engineer — not a bench. You meet them before you commit.
In your standups by Friday
They join your tracker, your code review, your AWS account. Work lands in your repo.
Ships every sprint
Flat monthly invoice. Adjust capacity or stop at the end of any cycle. The code was always yours.
# the-guarantee
We make embedding one low-risk.
Month-to-month
No annual lock-in. Scale up, down, or stop at the end of any cycle.
No recruiting fee
No retained search, no 20% placement fee. The flat monthly rate is the rate.
Zero conversion fee
Hire your FDE onto your payroll anytime — we don’t charge to release them.
US-based, your timezone
Senior US engineers across Lehi, Salt Lake City, and San Diego. No offshore handoffs.
# book-a-time
Book your strategy call.
No form required.
Grab a time below — 30 minutes on Zoom or in Lehi. You leave with a capacity recommendation, a named engineer, and a flat monthly number. No obligation.