Plank Research

Research

We publish what we learn from building and deploying AI in production: first-party data on the forward-deployed engineering market, and technical deep-dives from real engagements.

6 companies · October 2026

FDE race: key player profiles

Company dossiers on the six biggest players in forward-deployed engineering: OpenAI's Deployment Company, Anthropic's Ode, Microsoft Frontier, AWS FDE, Distyl AI, and Palantir. Metrics, leadership, org structure, and signals.

June 2026

The state of FDE as a service, 2026

How forward-deployed engineering went from a Palantir job title to a multi-billion-dollar category in under a year, with third-party market data and first-party analysis of Plank engagements.

First-party census

The FDE job market, mapped

A first-party census of open forward-deployed engineer roles across hundreds of companies, filterable by vertical, funding stage, region, and salary, down to the individual posting.

With the ARC Prize team

LangGraph templates to solve the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark

An open-source, stateful multi-agent LangGraph template that combines memory, vision, planning, and spatial reasoning to solve LS20, the first game in the ARC-AGI-3 reasoning benchmark.

Cover image for LangGraph templates to solve the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark

33 companies · 277 open roles

FDE company profiles

Per-company profiles for the top companies hiring forward-deployed engineers. Tech stacks, hiring regions, seniority mix, and signals mined directly from job descriptions.

Put an embedded AI team on your roadmap

Forward-deployed engineers to deploy, AI-native engineers to build, and on-demand QA pods to validate, embedded with your team, starting the same day.