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The forward-deployed engineers who made a big impact in 2026, as nominated by their peers
9Annabel Strauss
Product Manager at Scale AI
8Niall Turbitt
Senior Staff Data Scientist at Databricks specializing in machine learning, LLM applications, and MLOps.
Gal Wachtel
AI products for a more equitable future
Boaz Francis
Head of Forward Deployed Engineering @ Wonderful | ex-Palantir
8Vinny Chakradhar
Managing Director at SaxeCap
7Kevin Bai
Member of Technical Staff, Applied AI at Anthropic
7Leo Mehr
Co-Founder and Head of Lumos Labs
7Eddy Lee
Head of Enterprise Growth and Deployment at Runway
7Milos Mandic
Founder & Editor at FDE Hub
Kian Fattahy
SWE @ Saronic
Damon Doucet
OpenAI Head of FDE Platform | ex-Benchling
Paavany Jayanty
Leads AI Forward Deployed Engineering in the US at Atlassian
Gene Karshenboym
Engineering + Commercial Exec | Board Member | Vintage Car Enthusiast
6Malik Ismail
Head of Applied AI at Glean
Jay Greenblatt
Forward Deployed Engineer at Ramp
5Emily Broadhurst
AI Engineer at Distyl building production AI systems and self-correcting guardrails.
Sam Passaglia
Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI
Anthony Mein
Forward Deployed Engineer at Cresta
4Eugene Nho
Director of Product Management at Meta Superintelligence Labs, building agentic models and forward-deployed agents.
4Conor B. Murphy
Director, AI Forward Deployed Engineering at Databricks
4Rishabh Anand
Product Lead, AI Decisioning and AdStudio at Hightouch
3Daniel Wheller
VP Business, Strategy & Growth at Hebbia
3Chase Marshall
Senior FDE at Saronic Technologies
3Colin Jarvis
Global Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI
2Jia Wu
Deployed Engineering Lead at Cognition
2Lucas Kiefer
Forward Deployed Engineer at Strala
2Luv Kothari
GM, Forward Deployed AI Engineering at Snowflake
Nicolas Schuhl
Head of Applied AI at Mistral AI
1Amandeep Khurana
Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, leading Forward Deployed Engineering
Jove Zhong
Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Cresta
Roberto Barroso-Luque
Head of Applied AI at Fireworks AI
Jennifer Cramer
SVP, Forward Deployed Engineering at Salesforce
Madison Faulkner
1Diego Ballona
Sanjay Saraf
Head of FDE @ Luminai
Rohan Chandra
AI deployment leader at SpaceXAI
0Senta Knuth
Enterprise Product Deployment Lead at ElevenLabs
Isabel Gomez
FDE @ OpenAI
0Marcello Pedersen
Global Forward Deployed Engineering Lead at Databricks
0James Defauw
Building (at) Poetic