Forward deployed engineering services
Move Enterprise Software and AI from Pilot to Production
Our forward deployed engineers (FDEs) work alongside your teams to integrate AI, ERP and custom applications into your existing systems, with clear ownership from discovery through production.
ISO 27001 Certified
Oracle Partner
Snowflake Partner
AWS Partner
For CIOs and COOs Who Own a Pilot That Works Everywhere Except Production
Projects don’t stall because the idea is wrong. They stall at the last mile, where new software meets your ERP, your data and the people who have to use it, long after the vendor has moved on.
We put senior engineers inside your systems, agree the outcome and the number it is judged on, then stay until it runs in production.
What Is a Forward Deployed Engineer?
A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is an engineer who works closely with a customer’s team, systems and data to solve a specific operational or technical problem. The role combines software engineering with hands-on discovery and implementation in the customer’s environment.
The model can support AI, ERP integration, custom applications, data platforms and modernization. It is especially useful when success depends on fitting technology to complex business workflows rather than delivering code to a fixed specification.
Understand the real workflow
Work with users and technical owners to map current processes, data, exceptions and constraints.
Build in the target environment
Develop and validate an increment using agreed access, security, and change-control requirements.
Release and hand over
Prepare tests, monitoring, rollback guidance, runbooks, and knowledge transfer for ongoing ownership.
The Three Layers of Forward Deployed Engineering
The model or prototype returns the right answer, on a clean sample of data, in a demo environment. The business case is built on that demo.
That integration is just plumbing to be done at the end, that the real process matches the documented one, and that users will adopt it once it exists.
Engineers inside your ERP, data and permissions from week one. Discovery with the people who run the process today. A costed, reversible path to production.
Your Users Define It. Our Pod Owns It. Production Proves It.
Forward deployed engineering is not simply extra capacity or an advisory engagement. The customer retains business decisions and release approvals; the engineering pod is accountable for the agreed delivery work and for making the solution operable.
Business outcome, stakeholders, access approvals, and the definition of “live”.
Written scope, delivery plan, access checklist and agreed measures.
Access to users, process owners and relevant systems.
Workflow and data mapping, exception analysis and validation of assumptions.
Feedback on whether the increment solves the business problem.
A testable implementation in the agreed environment.
Approval through established change and release processes.
Testing, monitoring, rollback preparation and AI evaluations or guardrails where relevant.
Decision on internal ownership, continued support or the next release.
Documentation, runbooks, knowledge transfer and agreed operational handover.
One accountable lead
A named senior FDE lead owns discovery, architecture and the production outcome. One contract, one point of accountability.
ROI defended before code is written
Scoping ends with one agreed outcome and the number it is judged on. If the case doesn't hold up, you hear it in week one, not at go-live.
Nothing left behind a vendor wall
Your repositories, your environment, your change process. Every release reviewed and reversible, and the code is yours from day one.
Our Forward Deployed Engineering Services
Bring in an engineering pod for a stalled pilot, a complex integration or a production workflow that needs hands-on implementation.
Pilot Rescue & Production Release
Connect a stalled proof of concept to the systems it was never wired into, and get it live with tests, monitoring and a rollback plan.
ERP Extensions & Integrations
Custom extensions and integrations for Oracle Fusion, Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP, worked inside your data model, your permissions and your change process.
Custom Applications & Portals
Customer, supplier and partner portals and internal tools, connected to the systems behind them rather than bolted alongside them.
AI Workflows & Agents in Production
Reconciliation, document and forecasting agents that clear real exception queues, with evaluations, guardrails and human review where the risk needs it.
Data Platforms & Operational BI
Warehouses, pipelines and dashboards that finance and operations teams trust enough to close the month on.
Legacy Modernization & Cloud Migration
Re-platform the applications your business depends on, one reversible increment at a time, without stopping the business that runs on them.
Forward Deployed Engineering, Matched to How Your Industry Operates
Four industries where our forward deployed engineers work, with examples of the outcomes delivered.
The Challenge
Coordinated bust-out fraud rings cost a multinational retail bank millions a year. Monitoring tools scored accounts in isolation, and siloed transactional and customer master data hid multi-party linkages.
How We Help
Forward deployed engineers work behind a façade over the core, so new services reach users without changes to the ledger. Every release follows your change and approval process with evidence captured for audit.
Deliverables
Real-time streaming pipelines on Apache Kafka · graph architecture (Neo4j / Amazon Neptune) mapping millions of daily entity connections · analyst UI extension for network visualization and one-click regulatory filing prep.
Quantified Result
$14.2M in annual losses prevented, with 31% fewer false positives.
The Challenge
A global logistics provider ran AGV and AMR fleets from different vendors in closed data silos. High-volume aisles deadlocked while processing lines sat idle, and the vendor software had no open APIs into the warehouse management system.
How We Help
Three FDEs embedded at the flagship distribution center for a 10-week sprint and delivered fleet orchestration middleware between the WMS and the multi-vendor robot APIs, with edge microservices ingesting sub-second spatial telemetry to reroute fleets around traffic and balance workloads live.
Deliverables
Robotic fleet orchestration middleware with standardized API schemas and ROS bridges · high-throughput spatial telemetry pipeline for collision-avoidance routing · intralogistics dispatch dashboard wired into the existing WMS and SAP ERP.
Quantified Result
Material delivery velocity, with $5.3M in audited annual gains per facility.
The Challenge
A healthcare network wanted faster patient matching for oncology trials across unstructured physician notes and structured EHR. HIPAA mandates, HL7 and FHIR formats and fragmented text logs blocked the internal analytics team.
How We Help
FDEs embed inside the hospital’s secure IT estate and deliver a private cloud-native parsing pipeline, with clinical NLP extracting concepts, diagnoses and genetic markers, and automated de-identification scrubbing PHI before data reaches the matching interface.
Deliverables
FHIR-compliant integration pipeline for heterogeneous EHR ingest · clinical NLP engine mapped to SNOMED-CT and ICD-10 · zero-trust, role-based query portal with granular audit logs.
Quantified Result
Per-patient trial matching, 85% faster, on a 100% compliant audit.
The Challenge
A multi-brand retail chain had severe inventory mismatches: online orders cancelled against stock that wasn’t there, while regional warehouses sat heavy. The legacy batch system updated once every 24 hours.
How We Help
FDEs embed in the e-commerce platform and warehouse management systems and deliver an event-driven ledger tracking every POS sale, online order and delivery as it happens, with microservices reconciling global stock instantly and dynamic pricing triggering localized markdowns.
Deliverables
High-availability event ledger handling 50,000+ transactions per second · omnichannel reconciliation microservices on elastic cloud · automated markdown engine wired into checkout and digital store signage.
Quantified Result
Digital fulfillment accuracy, 14% lower carry costs, +4.6% margin.
Take the pilot that stalled before production and get it live.
The scope, the sequence and the access we need, walked through end to end by a senior FDE lead.
Five phases that take one outcome from access to production
Click any step to see what happens inside it and what you receive.
A 90-minute session to choose the outcome that matters most and agree what “live” means. Access and security sign-off land before engineering starts.
Output: Written scope, named pod, access checklist and the number the engagement is judged on.
Your FDE lead sits with the people who run the process today and maps the real workflow, data and exceptions, not the documented version.
Output: Real process map, exception catalog and a confirmed or corrected ROI case.
A working increment on your own systems and data, demonstrated to stakeholders before the engagement widens. Small enough to reverse, real enough to judge.
Output: Running increment in your environment, with tests and a demo to your stakeholders.
The pod works inside your stack with automated tests, monitoring and, for AI, evaluations and guardrails. The first release goes live behind your change process.
Output: Live release, monitoring, rollback plan and release notes through your own approval chain.
Take the next release, have us train your team to own it, or keep the pod on to run and improve the system. You own the code either way.
Output: Runbooks, documentation, knowledge-transfer sessions and a handover plan your team can run without us.
FDE as a Service: Three Ways to Engage Our Forward Deployed Engineers
FDE Sprint
Time-boxed: one application, integration or AI workflow taken from idea, or from a stalled pilot, to live. A senior FDE lead and a small engineering team.
FDE Pod
A standing pod owning a roadmap across one function such as finance, supply chain or customer operations. A senior FDE lead and a dedicated team.
FDE Program
Several pods under one program lead, with shared architecture and governance. For ERP and multi-system programs.
Security onboarding included
NDAs, data processing agreements and your security questionnaire completed before kickoff, with least-privilege access revoked at handover.
Weekly demos, not status decks
Stakeholders see working software every week, inside your own systems, rather than a progress report about it.
You own the code and IP
Every model includes production monitoring and full ownership of code, configuration, tests and documentation, in your repositories from the first commit.
Engage FDE engineers on demand, without recruiting them in-house.
Why Choose GrowExx for Forward Deployed Engineering?
Vendor-Neutral and Model-Neutral
We are not paid by Oracle, SAP, OpenAI or any model provider to recommend them. The stack is chosen on accuracy, cost and your data requirements, and we will tell you when the simpler option wins.
ROI Defended Before Code Is Written
Scoping ends with one agreed outcome, a definition of "live", and the number the engagement is judged on. If the case doesn't hold up, you hear it in week one, not at go-live.
One Senior FDE Lead, Accountable
A named lead owns discovery, architecture and the production outcome from day one to go-live. One contract, one point of accountability, no handoff between sales and delivery.
Audit-Grade Governance
ISO 27001 certified, with SOC 2 attestation. Least-privilege access, your change and approval process, logged system actions and completed security review before kickoff.
Your Environment, Your Code
We work and deploy in your cloud, VPC or on-premise environment, in your repositories from the first commit. Your data stays where it is unless you decide otherwise.
Reversible Increments, Full Handover
Every release can be rolled back, and every engagement ends with tests, monitoring, runbooks, and knowledge transfer so your team can run the system without us.
Explore how forward deployed engineering could work on your stalled project.
AI Engineers Who Can Talk to Your CFO and Debug Your Data Pipeline
FDE lead
Owns discovery, architecture and the production outcome. Your single point of accountability, from day one to go-live.
Forward deployed software engineer
Owns the application, APIs and screens your users work in, developed and released inside your own stack.
Integration and ERP engineer
Connects new software to Oracle, SAP, your CRM and internal APIs, within your permissions and your change process.
Forward deployed AI engineer
An AI forward deployed engineer models and moves the data, then delivers the retrieval, agent and evaluation components where the work calls for them.
QA and reliability engineer
Owns tests, monitoring and release quality, so the system stays trustworthy after go-live.
Remote-embedded by default
The pod works in your repositories, ticketing and standups, with daily overlap in your time zone. Your FDE lead joins on-site for workshops and go-live.
The pod's mix follows the work.
Forward Deployed Engineering Case Studies
Four engagements where our engineers embedded inside the client’s systems and stayed until the work was live in production.
Unifying Siloed Industrial IoT for Real-Time Yield Optimization
Batch yields and quality varied between plants. Sensor data was locked inside site-specific SCADA networks and legacy historians, and internal IT could not safely bridge plant-floor OT to corporate networks under hazardous-environment security rules.
An FDE pod embedded on-site at the flagship plant for eight weeks. Working alongside plant engineers, they engineered real-time pipelines on edge gateways over legacy OPC-UA and Modbus, using a read-only unidirectional bridge so millions of sensor points reached a central analytics platform without touching physical plant controls.
Result: +4.2% batch yield, 18% less unplanned asset downtime. Stack: OPC-UA, Modbus, edge gateways, unidirectional bridge, cloud analytics
Exception-Handling AI That Survived Contact With Production
An off-the-shelf AI model for procurement broke immediately in production. It could not handle the messy cases that make up real work: vendor disputes, unwritten policy adjustments and currency anomalies.
Rather than work from client documentation, an FDE shadowed procurement agents for two weeks to map how exceptions were really handled. They then delivered retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation systems tuned to the internal compliance rulebook, with safeguards that route multi-million dollar disputes to senior auditors and auto-approve standard variances.
Stack: RAG pipeline, evaluation harness, internal compliance rulebook, exception routing to named auditors
Secure Multitenancy That Passed Agency Accreditation
The agency needed absolute data isolation between operational teams. A standard multi-tenant cloud architecture would not pass sovereignty and zero-trust regulatory review.
Embedded FDEs engineered database-per-tenant isolation inside the client’s private air-gapped cloud: isolated Kubernetes namespaces, cross-namespace traffic locked down by network policy, distinct customer-managed KMS keys, and a tenant router service that resolves every authentication call strictly to isolated resources.
Result: full agency security accreditation. Stack: air-gapped private cloud, Kubernetes namespaces, network policies, customer-managed KMS, tenant router
Dynamic Pilot Scheduling That Re-Optimizes in Real-Time
Sudden weather disruption triggered cascade failures across crew assignments. Existing scheduling tools could not re-optimize crew paths in real-time, so disruptions became cancellations.
In a rapid workflow-launch sprint, FDEs embedded with flight dispatch operators and delivered a reactive micro-application connecting legacy crew tracking to live aviation weather feeds, with optimization that accounts for union work rules, FAA rest mandates and evolving airline policy.
Stack: legacy crew tracking systems, live aviation weather feeds, custom optimization engine
The CFOs and CIOs we've worked with.
GrowExx is the only partner who refused to start coding until we agreed on the ROI math. That discipline is exactly why our reconciliation agent shipped on time, on budget.
We had three AI vendors. Two showed us demos. GrowExx showed us the eval harness, the cost-per-task dashboard, and the rollback plan. That's why they got the contract — and the renewal.
Their team treats every agent like a regulated piece of software, not a science project. That's the difference between a pilot you brag about and an agent your auditor signs off on.
Talk to the team behind these outcomes.
Stay up to date with our recent posts
What Forward Deployed Engineers at Palantir, OpenAI and Anthropic Actually Do
What We Learn in the Field, Your Pod Brings on Day One
Every deployment leaves reusable assets behind. Recogent, Hirin and Readerr all started as problems our engineers solved inside client systems, so your pod doesn’t start from a blank page.
Where to go next.
For teams who want governed AI assistance inside their own delivery process, measured on delivery metrics.
For estates that need re-platforming one reversible increment at a time, without stopping the business.
For extensions, integrations and migrations across Oracle Fusion and E-Business Suite.
For teams that already have a clear backlog and specs, and simply need more engineering hands.
