Hire an engineer who moves in.
A forward deployed engineer from Pruta embeds in your operation, learns it the way an insider does, and builds what it actually needs — with a fleet of AI employees behind them. Not a report. Not a licence. Someone who owns the result. One engineer, yours by the month.
The role Palantir invented — and AI made affordable
Most software companies sell you a product and leave. Palantir did the opposite: they sent their engineers to live inside the customer's business — sitting with the people doing the work, learning the problems nobody had written down, and building against them on the spot. The industry copied it, because it kept working. The lesson underneath is the useful part: the hard bit was never writing the code. It was knowing what to build.
A consultant studies it
You get an analysis, a slide deck, and a recommendation. Somebody else builds it — later, at a second price, if it survives the quarter.
A software vendor sells you a product
It was built for the average of a thousand companies. Your business does the bending, and the parts that don't fit become somebody's manual workaround forever.
A contract developer waits for a spec
They build exactly what you asked for. Whatever you didn't know to ask for stays broken, and nobody in the building is accountable for noticing.
A forward deployed engineer finds it and fixes it
They work inside your operation until they understand it the way no meeting or written brief could ever hand over — then build against what they find, and answer for the result rather than for a deliverable.
Why one engineer can now do what a team used to
For most of software's history an engineer's output was capped by how fast they could build. That cap is gone. Every Pruta engineer directs a fleet of AI employees that carries the production work — the writing, the wiring, the testing, the shipping — around the clock, at a cost that does not resemble headcount.
What that leaves is the half which never got cheaper: knowing which problem is worth solving, and being close enough to your business to see it before anyone thinks to report it. That judgement is the product. The fleet is how it gets built by Friday.
The bottleneck was never the typing. It was understanding the business.
What the first month looks like
They move in.
Your systems, your calls, your inbox, your numbers. They watch how the work actually flows — not how the org chart says it does.
Something real ships.
Before any roadmap, one visible thing gets fixed and put into production. Proof first; plans after.
The fleet goes to work.
Standing jobs handed to AI employees — publishing, support, content, follow-up — each one monitored, cost-capped, and reporting to you.
They stay close.
Every week they understand your business better than the week before, and the backlog they work from is one they wrote themselves.
Month to month. Cancel anytime. Everything built transfers to you.
What “finding the problem” actually looks like
In one deployment inside a subscription research business, the brief was to rebuild a website. Here is what the engineer found while doing it — none of it on the brief, none of it reported by anyone:
- Fourteen paying members who could not get in.Thirteen of them had never complained — they would have quietly cancelled. The fault was not on their end: corporate security scanners were opening their one-time sign-in links before they clicked, spending them.
- Four subscribers unreachable for months.A single bounced message had silently blocked each address, and every email sent afterwards was dropped without a trace or a warning.
- A publishing process that ate a day per issue.Now one step: the finished piece goes out to every subscriber, on the site and by email, in six languages.
Nobody filed a ticket for any of it. Nobody knew. Finding that class of problem is the entire job — and you only find it from the inside.
What you would otherwise do instead
Hiring a senior engineer
$200,000+ a year, a three-month search, six weeks to become useful — and they still need someone to tell them what to build.
With an FDE: Starts this month, useful in week one, and arrives with a fleet already running.
Bringing in a consultancy
You pay for the thinking. Building it is a separate engagement, at a separate price, with people who were not in the room.
With an FDE: The thinking and the building are the same person, in the same month.
Handing an agency a brief
They will execute your brief well. If the brief is wrong, you receive precisely the wrong thing, on schedule.
With an FDE: Your engineer writes the brief, because they are the one who found the problem.
Buying more software
Another licence, another login, another process your team quietly reshapes itself around.
With an FDE: Built to your operation as it actually runs — and it is yours when it ships.
How to hire one
- A named engineer, embedded in your business. Not a ticket queue and not a rotating bench — one person who knows your operation and answers you directly.
- The fleet comes with them. AI employees do the production work under the engineer's direction, metered and hard-capped so the bill cannot run away.
- Approval-gated from day one. Nothing reaches your customers without sign-off. As each desk proves itself, you loosen the leash — never all at once.
- Everything transfers to you. Prompts, playbooks, accounts, code. Leave whenever you like and it all hands over — that is in writing.
Priced like the senior hire it is. You are not buying project hours — you are hiring the person who restructures your company around AI, with a fleet working under them.
What it costs depends on how much of that engineer you need and how large the fleet under them grows — agreed on the call, before anything is charged. Month to month, no long-term contract, and every asset hands over to you whenever you ask.
Questions we get
Do we need to be technical?
No — most of the businesses we deploy into are not. You describe the problem the way you would to a colleague. Everything downstream of that sentence is the engineer's job.
Is this on-site or remote?
Remote-first and genuinely embedded: in your systems, your calls, and whatever channel your team already lives in. On-site when a specific problem earns the trip.
We already have engineers. Where does this fit?
Alongside them, not above them. A forward deployed engineer takes the work that never reaches a roadmap — the operational glue, the leaks, the two-week wins that never justify a sprint. Your team keeps the core product.
How is this different from your managed fleet?
The fleet fills defined roles you already know you need, from $5,000 a month. A forward deployed engineer decides what ought to exist in the first place, then builds it — using the fleet as their staff. Plenty of companies start with one and add the other.
Who owns what gets built?
You do. Every prompt, playbook, account, and line of code hands over cleanly, at any point, including the day you leave. Prefer not to carry any of it? We will keep hosting and running it. Your call.
How quickly do we see something?
Something real in production inside the first week, and a full picture of what we would build — with costs — by the end of the first month.
What if it is not working?
You are month to month, and we will be the ones to say it first. If a deployment is not earning its fee, we fix it or we shrink it.
Put an engineer inside your business.
Tell us what is slowing you down — we will come back within one business day with what a forward deployed engineer would do about it, and what it would cost.