We've seen the gap at scale.
FDE Factory was built by people who spent years inside McKinsey, Deloitte, EY, and the world's largest banks and insurers, watching the same pattern repeat: brilliant AI demos, broken paths to production.
We didn't start FDE Factory because the world needed another AI course. We started it because we kept seeing the same failure mode from the inside, at scale, across industries, with budgets that should have been enough.
A model vendor wins the room. A consultancy delivers a proof of concept. Then the engagement ends, the SE rotates off, and the client team inherits a system they didn't build, without evals, without context plumbing, without anyone who lives in their perimeter. The pilot joins the graveyard. The executive asks why AI isn't moving the business.
That isn't a technology problem. It's a people problem, and almost nobody was training for the role that actually closes it.
[ Founders ]
Our founders come from strategy and transformation at McKinsey, Deloitte, and EY, and from deep work inside global banks and insurance companies. We've led programs where the stakes were real: compliance, revenue, operational risk, not slide decks.
McKinsey, Deloitte, and EY, where we watched billion-dollar AI programs stall not on models, but on embedding, governance, and ownership inside the business.
Global financial institutions, where a working demo and a governed production system are worlds apart, and regulators don't care which model you picked.
We've sat in the rooms where pilots die: security review, data residency, stakeholder politics, and the Tuesday when nobody owns the last mile.
We built FDE Factory to create the supply we kept asking clients to find: engineers who embed, ship governed agentic systems, and transfer capability before they leave. Not consultants who exit at go-live. Not bootcamp grads who've never sat in a client VPC.
[ Cohort 02 ]
You could spend years learning this by trial and error.
Or you could compress it into Cohort 02, 12 weeks, 40 seats, real partner environments, capstone graded by people who've seen what survives inside a bank, an insurer, or a Fortune 500 platform team.
We're not looking for the loudest résumé. We're looking for agency, risk-taking, and resilience: the traits that matter when you're alone inside someone else's company on a problem nobody fully scoped. If that sounds like you, we built this for you.
- · Track A: Forward Deployed Engineer (build & embed)
- · Track B: Forward Deployed Eval Engineer (evals & compliance)
- · Partner-graded capstone, not a certificate for showing up
[ Pods ]
You don't need another pilot. You need someone who stays.
If you've run the six-month search, hired the consultancy, and still don't have governed production. You already know the gap we're solving. FDE Factory trains pods of FDEs and FDEEs who embed in days, work inside your perimeter, and bring your team along for the ride.
Our founders have been on your side of the table, writing business cases, defending spend to the board, and explaining to regulators why an agent is safe to run. We designed the program and the pod model for that reality, not for a sandbox demo.
- · Trained FDE + FDEE pods: build and eval together
- · VPC / on-prem embed: your data, your keys
- · Capability transfer built in, not permanent dependency
New to the role? Start with our guide to hiring FDEs.
People, not platforms
Companies don't fail at AI because they picked the wrong model. They fail because no one on the team knows how to embed, ship, and sustain agentic systems inside the business.
Two tracks, one standard
FDEs build. FDEEs keep production agents honest. Both go through the same rigorous 12-week program, with real partners grading the work.
Cohort 02 · 40 seats
Cohort 02 is capped at 40 seats. We care about who you're learning alongside, and whether you have the agency, appetite for risk, and resilience the role demands.
We train you to leave
Every deployment is designed so the client's team gets stronger as the pod works. We create supply; you keep the capability.
Get in touch
Applying to Cohort 02 or hiring a pod? Use the links below. For press, partnerships, or anything else. Send us a message.