​The role of the FDE is evolving quickly as companies navigate increasingly complex agent and software deployments. We're bringing together Colin Jarvis (Head of FDE at Open AI), Calvin Lee (VP of Special Projects at Ramp), Jason Hoch (Founder of Nominal) and Howard Zuo (Founder of Dataland) to discuss how forward deployed engineering is changing and why it is quickly becoming the most important role for leading startups today.

​Agenda:

• ​5:30pm: Doors Open

• ​6-7pm: Panel Conversation & Q&A

• ​7-8pm: Networking

​About the Panelists:

​Colin Jarvis: Colin leads OpenAI’s Global Forward Deployed Engineering practice, which sits at the intersection of Product and Research. This team of engineers are embedded into companies to build AI products that solve critical business problems and push the bounds of what our models can do. He is one of the world’s leading experts in the practical deployment of AI, having been responsible for OpenAI’s technical deployments at Morgan Stanley, Klarna, Coca-Cola and many others.

​Calvin Lee: Calvin is VP of Special Projects at Ramp. Calvin joined Ramp in May 2019, two months after the company was founded, and has run teams across the business, from FDE to marketing to post-sales.  He graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science with a focus on AI. His background is in competitive math and competitive programming: he won a Silver medal at the IOI representing the U.S., and also finished top 20 on the Putnam exam. 

Jason Hoch: Jason is Co-founder and first software engineer at Nominal. Previously, he spent five years across Silicon Valley startups — growing Newfront's engineering team from 5 to 30, going through YC S20 as a co-founder, and leading Vercel's Edge Data team. He started his career at Palantir, where he led an early Foundry platform team building data engineering tools for the DoD, oil & gas, and manufacturing. Jason holds an SB in Theoretical Math and CS from MIT, where he met his Nominal co-founder Cameron.

​Howard Zuo: Howard is Co-Founder & CEO at Dataland. Dataland is an applied AI lab that builds highly-adaptive AI Agents which quickly converge to functioning as total human equivalents for specific roles at specific companies. Dataland is based in New York City, and has created outsized economic wins for its partners in diverse sectors across healthcare, energy, marketplaces, consumer electronics, waste management, and logistics. Prior to Dataland, Howard held roles at Palantir spanning from Forward Deployed Engineer, to Deployment Strategist, to Product Engineering Lead.

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