AI-FDE
Quality at every stage. Resilience in every release. Flawless experiences every time.
Why do enterprise AI programs need forward deployed engineers?
Enterprise AI programs tend to stall in the first months of production, when data shifts, when an agent hits an edge case nobody modeled or when the team that built the pilot has moved on. QKTech’s AI forward deployed engineers start where your program starts, by engineering the agent itself with your team.
Reliability is part of how we build it, shaping the context the agent works from, the harness that governs what it can touch, the evaluations it must pass before release and the observability that shows how it behaves once live. The same engineers stay through the first months in production and bring our own agents into your quality and operations work.
Approach
Agent engineering first, with reliability built in
Most enterprises come to us with an agent they want to build, or one built quickly for a pilot that now must run in front of customers. Agent engineering is where every engagement starts, and two kinds of reliability work come with it.
Agent engineering
We design and build agents and agentic workflows for your use cases, applying context, harness and loop engineering, and connect them to the data and systems they depend on.
Reliability of AI
Every agent we build ships with evaluation suites, observability, guardrails and release discipline, applied before go-live and maintained afterwards. Release checks follow our GATES framework.
AI for reliability
We embed our own agents into your quality and operations work, covering test design, automation execution, defect triage, test data, monitoring and incident response, with agents our engineers own and tune.
What does a forward deployed engineer do?
A forward deployed engineer, or FDE, builds and adapts software from within the customer’s organization, close to the people who use it and the systems it must integrate with. The model comes from Palantir, which has long put technical staff inside customer environments.
Enterprise AI has revived the role, because an agent behaves differently in every environment, and the engineering that makes it dependable must happen where it runs.
Why choose QKTech for AI forward deployed engineering?
QKTech (formerly QualityKiosk Technologies) has spent 25+ years ensuring the reliability of systems that cannot afford to fail, from core banking and payments to insurance platforms carrying millions of policies and patient-centric medtech platforms. 4,000+ engineers now work across 25+ countries.
AI-FDE is one of six pillars of our Reliability OS for Enterprises, working hand in hand with Agent Engineering, alongside AI for Reliability, Reliability of AI, Digital Reliability and Reliability of Frontier Systems. Our AI forward deployed engineers bring that discipline, and the tools that go with it.
- Our six-parameter reliability model, covering functional correctness, security, scalability, resilience, customer experience and operations, now extended to models and agents.
- Every agent we deliver and deploy, both in-house and for clients, has a named owner, a versioned specification, an eval suite and a roadmap.
- techniqk, our platform suite, including qRace for test generation, Qlenium for synthetic monitoring, Guardian for security orchestration and Nimbus, our AI platform orchestrator.
- agentiqk, our agent platform and marketplace, with ready-built Marqk agents for industries and business functions.
- Recognition as the first major digital assurance provider to go AI-native with Computer by DevRev, which shows that we run our own delivery on agents.
- Recognition as a Leader in Everest Group’s Quality Engineering (QE) Specialist Services PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2025.
- Named International Agentic Testing Pioneer in the UiPath 2026 Partner Awards.
Success story
Success story from a recent engagement
The snapshot below shows how an FDE engagement runs from build to measured result.
25+
production-ready connectors built by a dedicated delivery pod for DevRev’s Snap-Ins marketplace, with 50% less development effort and 80% unit test coverage
100,000+
agent hours saved each year after an electric mobility company moved call summarization into production
FAQs
Common questions
Here is how we answer the questions that come up in most first conversations.
Who is an AI forward deployed engineer?
An engineer who builds and runs AI agents from inside your team, staying through the first months in production until your own people can operate the system.
Do you build the agents, or only make ours reliable?
Both, and building is where most engagements start. Our engineers build the agent with your team and engineer reliability in as part of the build. If you’ve already built it, we make what exists reliable to run in front of customers.
Where does reliability come in when you are building the agent?
Reliability comes in with the first design decision. The context an agent works from, the tools it can call and the checks it must pass are all set during the build, and those choices shape its behavior in production more than any testing added at the end.
Is this staff augmentation?
No. Every engineer we place works to the same reliability brief and has QKTech’s platforms and review process behind them.
How is this different from AI consulting?
A consulting engagement usually ends with a recommendation. An FDE engagement ends when the system runs reliably in production and your team can operate it without us.
Start with one agent
Tell us about the agent closest to production and our AI-FDE lead will get back to you with an agent readiness and reliability assessment and a proposed engagement model.