NYC's first FDE club founder: banks are building internal teams, and consultants are crossing over

Business Insider published a 7 November as-told-to essay with Patrick Kelly, Brooklyn-based cofounder and CEO of Port of Context and founder of Forward Deployed Engineers of New York (started June 2026). Kelly frames the club as a place for people who leave big tech for fast-growing startups and then carry the pressure of going into a customer's business to decide what to build.

He says the job finally has a shared name after years as solutions engineer, customer engineer, implementation engineer or field engineer. The FDE, in his account, goes into a large company, finds where AI can help, works with customer engineers for system access and with the business side on how value will be measured, then hands the workflow over after weeks or months of building.

On hiring, Kelly's useful signals for working FDEs are structural, not salary tables: New York has both AI employers hiring FDEs and plenty of places to deploy them; some banks that have watched the model are now building internal teams so they can run those projects without relying only on the AI vendors; big consulting firms are changing how they deliver AI work, and he is seeing technical consultants from places like McKinsey and Bain find a path into forward-deployed engineering. At his own company, FDEs (coding/technical) are paired with deployment strategists — a role he traces to Palantir — who keep the customer and project moving.

For candidates, he stresses stories about shipping inside your own company with a clear opportunity, buy-in and ROI number, plus explaining choices in business terms. He argues agents are doing more coding, which puts more weight on deciding what to build and why — the judgement FDEs already practise on site.