Kevin Bai

Kevin Bai is a Member of Technical Staff on the Applied AI team at Anthropic, where he helps companies build with and on top of Claude. His career has centered on forward deployed engineering: part consultant, part product manager, part software engineer. Before Anthropic, Kevin was the founding FDE hire at Rippling, growing the function from scratch to 20 FDEs in a year. Earlier, he spent multiple years at Palantir, leading teams and multi-million-dollar engagements for Fortune 500 organizations in industries including aviation, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods. He writes and hosts FDE Pod (fdepod.com), a newsletter and podcast covering Forward Deployed Engineering, Applied AI, and startups. He has spoken at AI Engineer World’s Fair, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Propel, and the United Nations. Prior to tech, Kevin’s background was in international affairs, representing the UN’s nuclear test-ban organization and building enterprise partnerships at UNHCR to solve refugee problems the agency couldn’t solve alone. He studied at UC Berkeley and Oxford, speaks the six official languages of the United Nations, and lives in San Francisco.