Forward Deployed Engineering
Jacobi’s Forward Deployed Engineering capability embeds technical investment expertise within your team to deliver custom investment workflow projects faster, whilst ensuring lasting knowledge transfer and ongoing support.
Why project-based investment technology builds fail to deliver long-term value
The first reason is the transactional delivery model. Project-focused development teams build to a fixed specification and disengage, prioritizing short-term delivery over capability transfer. Six months later, when workflows or market conditions shift, the internal team is left operating a system they do not fully understand and cannot easily adapt.
The second reason is a lack of deep investment domain knowledge. Generalist technology specialists can code what they are asked to build but lack the domain fluency to anticipate how a portfolio manager actually thinks. They cannot spot where a technically sound data model will break under real investment logic, causing specifications to misalign before a single line of code is written.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Jacobi’s Forward Deployed Engineers speak investment management, not just code.
Embedding directly into your team, Jacobi’s Forward Deployed Engineers leverage deep industry and investment tech expertise to build, launch, and industrialize custom workflows across your organization.
Our Investment Engineers are not generalist technologists. They have a deep understanding of portfolio construction, risk factor models, performance attribution, and the governance requirements of institutional investment management.
Jacobi has been doing this work in investment management for over a decade. The rich learnings from the patterns, the pitfalls, and the playbooks of each project are baked into every engagement.
Features & Capabilities
Key capabilities of Jacobi's Forward Deployed Engineers
Domain Fluency
Jacobi’s Forward Deployed Engineers are not generalist engineers learning investment management. They have built the same type of workflow before – at comparable institutions, on the same infrastructure. Your project benefits from everything they already know.
Knowledge Transfer
Every sprint is designed to transfer capability, not create dependency. Your team learns as the build progresses.
Continuity and Governance
Custom models and tools need to be maintained, updated, and governed as businesses evolve. Our ongoing partnership ensures that proprietary investment IP continues to run reliably over time.
Embedded Model
Our Forward Deployed Engineering capability sits inside your team. Regular stand-ups, defined milestones, paired delivery.
Harness-Native Builds
Jacobi’s Forward Deployed Engineers build directly on Jacobi’s Production Infrastructure and Workbench. No bespoke infrastructure to maintain after handover.
A Decade of Proven Patterns
Every build leverages Jacobi’s extensive library of pre-built workflow components, calculation patterns, and integration templates. Instead of starting from scratch, your team builds on tested infrastructure refined over a decade of multi-asset implementation.
Case Study
Delivering proprietary advisor workflows without off-the-shelf compromise
A large US wealth manager with an extensive advisor network needed a single tool to support portfolio review and client proposals, one that reflected its proprietary products, unique data structures, and specific regulatory requirements. Off-the-shelf solutions required too much compromise. The firm’s existing process was manual, inconsistent across advisors, and difficult to keep compliant at scale.
The Jacobi Forward Deployed Engineering team embedded with the investment technology team to build the solution. Because the engineers understood the investment and compliance context, the tool was scoped around the firm’s actual process which included look-through exposures, ex-ante analytics, capital market assumptions – rather than reverse-engineered from a generic implementation. The capability was handed back production ready. Advisors now run a consistent, governed review and proposal process across hundreds of holdings.
Our Clients Include
