FORWARD-DEPLOYED JOB TITLES

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Palantir renamed its solutions engineers to "Forward-Deployed Engineers" and called them Deltas, like Delta Force. It sounded ridiculous but worked brilliantly. The role attracted high-agency, high-EQ engineers who might otherwise have seen client-facing work as beneath them. The title gave the work prestige, and Palantir got a hiring moat. Now, Harvey is doing the same thing with "legal engineer." The test for whether this is real or just title inflation: does the new title describe work that would have been unrecognizable five years ago? "Prompt engineer" already feels dated because the work turned out to be a feature of every job rather than a job itself.