Over the past few years, increasingly customers have shifted from asking “help us migrate and build data pipelines” to “help us solve our business problem.” That transition from infrastructure to outcomes is reshaping what customers expect from a services partner, and it has reshaped how we deliver.

Today, we’re formalizing that evolution: Databricks is launching our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. FDE isn't a new practice - it's how some of the most ambitious work at Databricks has been delivered for years. This focus accelerates our current capabilities and brings our Professional Services organization together under one roof with a single mission: accelerate customer business outcomes with AI.

In the last 12 months, our teams have worked with over 1,900 customers to achieve their data and AI goals, from AI-accelerated migrations to building first of its kind AI applications in partnership with Databricks R&D. With Fox, that meant embedding engineers alongside their team to accelerate production-grade innovation across their lines of business:

We’ve watched the work evolve in real time, and we’ve evolved with it: we first wrote about our OKR-centric delivery model in July 2024, and then shared learnings from our agile service delivery approach. Embedding within accounts and rapidly delivering innovation is core to FDE at Databricks, which has shaped how we partner with customers like JPMC:

For many customers, modernization is the path to AI, not a detour from it. Consolidating onto the Lakehouse, retiring legacy warehouses, and rationalizing data pipelines are the first steps that make every downstream outcome possible. FDE engages across that full arc, from the migration that unlocks the platform to the AI applications it powers.

Here’s what makes the Databricks FDE experience different, and what you can expect from working with our team that you can’t get anywhere else.