Shakers for companies
Work with a contract Forward Deployed Engineer
A contract Forward Deployed Engineer to get your AI operating on your real systems: deployment on your infrastructure, RAG over your data, agents with guardrails and integration with SAP, Salesforce or ServiceNow.
Every FDE passes Shakers' certification with audited deployments and documented enterprise integrations. An expert FDE brings a track record of deployments to the table: what they've put into production, not what they promise.
- Certified talent in AI and agent skills
- Meet up to 3 AI Builders in 72 h
- Flexible collaboration models




















European clients across different industries
We work with the top 4% of certified talent in our community
Meet 3 certified candidates in under 72 h
Our clients' satisfaction on Trustpilot
The talent mix your company needs
At Shakers you will find AI Engineers and specialists across Tech, Product and Data
What this profile brings to your project
A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who works inside the client's environment to put AI into production: they adapt the product to real systems, build RAG and agents over the company's data and integrate the code with SAP, Salesforce or ServiceNow. The deliverable is the solution running in production, not a report.
Palantir popularised the role; today OpenAI, Anthropic and the UK government's No10 Innovation Fellowship hire FDEs to close the last mile between pilot and production.
One provider. One contract. Full traceability
How Shakers works for your company
Post your project
Tell us about the project, its scope, the expertise you need and when you want to get to work.
You get three options
We match your brief against certified talent and introduce the three AI Builders who fit best.
The last word is yours
Meet the three specialists and choose who you collaborate with; we handle the rest.
Why work with Shakers
The advantages of adding this profile with Shakers
From pilot to production on your stack
The engagement starts where the demo stalled: deployment on your real systems and constraints, across AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
RAG that answers with your data
Retrieval and generation connected to your documents and databases: embeddings, cited sources and answers anchored in company knowledge.
Agents with guardrails and evals
Agent workflows over real processes with LangChain or LlamaIndex, action limits and evals that measure accuracy before you scale.
Integration with SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow
AI connected to where your operation lives: APIs, data and processes of the ERP and the CRM, without rebuilding what works.
Code your team can maintain
Python or TypeScript on CI/CD, with the integration logic documented so your team follows every deployment without its author.
The deployment stays documented
Architecture, integrations and decisions written down at close: if the talent changes, another certified FDE picks it up.
Frequently asked questions
Any other questions? Our team will answer them.
Tell us about your AI projectFDE, AI Engineer or Solutions Engineer: which one?
Do I engage an FDE by project or on staff?
How fast can an FDE start?
How is a Forward Deployed Engineer certified?
What stack does the UK market ask of an FDE?
Does the FDE work on-site or with your team remotely?
What an FDE does first in your project
Not a discovery workshop: systems reading. The FDE reviews with your team where the data lives, what security constraints the environment has and which parts of the pilot are worth saving, before writing a line.
RAG and agents over your systems
The pattern the UK market asks for: document ingestion, embeddings, retrieval with cited sources and agents with LangChain or LlamaIndex over concrete processes, in Python. The proof is not the demo: it is the evals left running.
The integration the pilot never did
The last mile is rarely the model: it is connecting by API with the ERP, the CRM or the ticketing that already runs the operation, and getting the result to where people work. That is where a pilot becomes a used system.
A demand you can measure in the UK
In September 2026 there are 83 active UK postings titled Forward Deployed Engineer, 65 of them in London, across 56 employers: Google, Anthropic, ByteDance, Cloudflare or Accenture's Palantir practice, with advertised senior packages from £90K to £250K.
Connect with AI specialists to build your next project
Find specialists in Tech, Product, Data to complement your team
AI Engineer
The one who builds the system the FDE deploys: if the model or the product is still missing, their row covers the build before the last mile.
AI Agent Developer
When the brief is orchestrating agents over processes (tools, memory, guardrails) without deploying on the client yet: pure agent construction.
Context Engineer
The window that feeds the model: RAG, memory and retrieval. The data-layer specialisation the FDE integrates into your systems.
AI Reliability Engineer
When the system you shipped has to hold: evals, regression and drift on a loop. The natural handover for your delivery.
The AI talent you need Certified by Shakers
We introduce you to three ready_to_build AI Builders in 72 hours.