I was a "Programmer Analyst" at a consulting firm for almost four years, which is the same thing as a "Forward Deployed Engineer". Basically what it means is a consultant who writes software for the client, frequently involving on-site travel and face-to-face interaction with clients to gather requirements and design systems.
A forward-deployed engineer is a fancy title for an engineer who is stationed permanently onsite at the client, usually with their own dedicated desk/office.
A business cultivation engineer is basically a sales engineer responsible for interfacing with and being a technical resource for the client's technical buying team (e.g. IT department).
> who is stationed permanently onsite at the client
Not really necessary. The distinction between FDEs and product engineers is that the FDE work is focused on a single deployment, whereas a product engineer works on a single product and is once-removed from actual clients.
Where the FDE spends time and what products he works on depends on the client requirements.
The impression I got after talking to Palantir on a number of occasions and talking to different engineers is that a FDE is a cross between a contracted engineer needed for staff augmentation and a software integrator. These are both jobs that are typically bid really low (most system integrators in the DoD space pay pretty poor salaries compared to the vendors of the products that are being integrated) and are not all that different in function from a role like a classic SAP consultant.
This approach really doesn't scale very well but given that the customer base really, really does not like to just take off the shelf software and wants to pay boatloads of money to customize software to their specifications, the software product is just a means to reduce friction and to lower the cost of integration compared to, say, building your own huge data pipeline with open source products from the ground up like oh... DCGS-A and its rebranding as ICITE http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/army-spent-5b-on-failed-technol...https://fcw.com/articles/2015/03/03/icite-faces-resistances....
