FAQ
Forward-deployed AI engineering, answered
What Plank is, who it’s for, and how an engagement works, for the technical buyer doing diligence.
What is Plank?
Plank embeds forward-deployed AI engineering capacity with technical teams. Plank engineers build AI products, deploy them into customers' real-world systems, and on-demand human QA pods validate every release. Vendor-neutral across OpenAI, Anthropic, and open models, starting the same day.
What is an AI-native engineer?
An AI-native engineer is a software engineer fluent in modern AI development, agents, LLM workflows, RAG systems, and AI product features, who builds production AI rather than only conventional software.
When should a company use Plank?
When you have more AI product, deployment, or QA work than your team can absorb, hiring AI-native engineers would take months, and you want embedded, high-context engineers who can contribute in days, without permanent headcount.
What is a forward-deployed engineer (FDE)?
A forward-deployed engineer is a software engineer who embeds directly with a customer's team to take AI from pilot to production: scoping architecture, integrating with real systems, and shipping alongside in-house engineers. Palantir popularized the role, and OpenAI and Anthropic now build their enterprise businesses around it.
What is FDE as a service?
FDE as a service means getting forward-deployed engineers as an embedded service instead of recruiting them. Plank trains AI-native FDEs and embeds them with your team, starting the same day. You get the deployment muscle without the multi-month hire, and without lab lock-in.
How fast can a Plank FDE embed?
The same day. After a short scoping call, your Plank FDE embeds immediately, joins your standups, reads the codebase, and ships to production within days, not the months a traditional hire takes.
How is Plank different from Palantir or lab FDEs?
Plank is vendor-neutral and startup-native. Palantir, OpenAI, and Anthropic deploy FDEs into large enterprises, and lab FDEs deploy their employer's stack. Plank FDEs embed with AI startups and scale-ups, and work across OpenAI, Anthropic, and open models, so your architecture stays yours.
Where are Plank engineers located?
Plank centres in San Francisco, Brazil, Spain, and Poland. Engineers work together in person from Plank pods as co-located teams, overlapping your working day, not scattered freelancers.
What do Plank FDEs actually work on?
Enterprise AI deployments end to end: agent pipelines, RAG, evals, voice, and integrations with systems of record, plus the unglamorous integration work that makes pilots stick in production.
What are Plank QA pods?
QA pods are Plank's QA-as-a-service. Real QA engineers + AI test every pull request and return bugs, repro steps, screen recordings, and a merge verdict within 24 hours.
What does it cost?
A flat monthly rate per embedded engineer or pod, comparable to marketplace contractors but trained, managed, and embedded in a fraction of the time. Reach out for a free trial and let us show you what a Plank FDE team can do, and we will share the current rate card on the first call.
Still have questions?
Book a scoping call and we’ll map the work to your stack.