Why it matters
At Palantir, forward deployed started as a literal description: you were deployed, physically, at the customer's site, and the onboarding project was keeping the platform from falling over. Natalie Meurer's dirty secret is that the title never settled after that.
My takeaway: The Dirty Secret of Forward Deployed Engineering — Natalie Meurer, Sierra is an enterprise-adoption signal. The practical read is to watch how deployment scale, data boundaries, operational ownership, and platform controls change as AI moves out of experiments.