The Day Forward-Deployed Engineering Became an IT Services Vocabulary — What EPAM's Q2 2026 Adoption of a Palantir Term Actually Means

In its Q2 2026 earnings release, EPAM Systems CEO Balazs Fejes described the company as a next-generation forward-deployed engineering organization. Forward-deployed engineering was originally a Palantir role, so seeing a 62,000-person global services firm adopt the term as its positioning is notable. This post covers the origins of FDE, the context in which EPAM picked it up, and what it implies for engineering-first services businesses.