MBN Solutions

09/10/2026

What a week. What a place. 🇺🇸

Even the robots have better moves than me in San Francisco. 🤖

Another brilliant evening at , this time on the rooftop with The ThinkTank VC
and SFPlayground - massive thanks to Nicholas Sharp for the invite 📈

Founders, investors, operators and a San Francisco sunset. A pretty good setting to meet people and hear what they’re building.

That’s been the best part of this week, meeting in person, hearing people’s stories and seeing where a conversation might lead.

Around 100 plus new LinkedIn connections, loads of follow-up and some good things ahead for MBN Solutions - People and community have always been at the heart of what we do. Plenty of that here.

And as always, BIG thanks to Victoria Ross and Barry McDonald Impact Rise Ventures for the opportunity to share such a great week with amazing founders from Scotland 📈

09/10/2026

Came to San Francisco to talk AI. Got outdanced by it instead 🤖🕺 -

07/10/2026

One of the best parts of being in San Francisco for is meeting people in person, hearing their stories, how their careers have unfolded and what’s next for them.

Brilliant catching up with Yaman Tandon yesterday. Really enjoyed hearing about his career journey and learning more about how things work in the US - You can’t beat a proper conversation in person.

Last night was a brilliant way to round off the day, bringing more good people together at the Scotland × San Francisco Tech Week mixer.

MBN Solutions was delighted to support the evening, hosted by Impact Rise Ventures and Techscaler 📈

People, relationships and community have always been at the heart of MBN. This is what it’s all about. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇺🇸
Networking MBNSolutions

06/10/2026

MBN on tour… and nobody’s driving! 🚘🤖

Our founder Michael taking his first driverless taxi in San Francisco during SF Tech Week.

You can spend all day talking about AI. Sitting in a car with an empty driver’s seat brings it home pretty quickly!

We’re here meeting the people building and deploying AI, exploring where it’s heading and the talent needed to make it happen.

This time, we’re along for the ride. 🌉

06/10/2026

05/10/2026

From Glasgow to San Francisco 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸

Day one of for MBN founder Michael Young, and plenty packed in already!

A morning at the State of the Market breakfast with the British Consulate and First Citizens Innovation Banking, plus visits to San Francisco City Hall and LinkedIn.

A brilliant start to a week of meeting founders, making connections and getting closer to the businesses building and deploying AI.

For MBN, this trip is about understanding what those businesses need as they grow, and connecting them with the AI engineers, forward deployed engineers, deployment strategists and leaders who can help them deliver.

Proud to represent Scotland and build on our growing work in the US. And there’s plenty more to come this week 🙌

In San Francisco for Tech Week? Drop us a message!

09/09/2026

Yesterday I wrote that FDE was moving beyond a job title and becoming an operating model.

Twenty-four hours later, Google Cloud and Accenture announce a 1,000-person FDE workforce.

This isn’t a title trend anymore.

It’s becoming an industry.

25/08/2026

Two interesting FDE signals this morning, and I think they’re connected.

First, London-based algosoup has become an OpenAI Select Partner.

Algosoup describes itself as a forward-deployed, AI-native engineering company, embedding small engineering pods directly with customers to take AI from idea through to production.

That caught my attention.

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at FDE teams being built inside OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir Technologies and the new generation of AI companies.

But we’re now starting to see another layer emerge: specialist forward-deployed engineering businesses being built around the frontier AI ecosystem itself.

Then there’s some interesting new FDE research published today covering 133 companies.

69.7% already have a formal or informal FDE function.

Another 15.2% are actively building one.

And 85.7% of those with FDE functions say finding the right mix of talent is their biggest challenge.

Perhaps the most interesting finding: half of the companies currently building an FDE function said their AI products were reaching customers but stalling before production.

That gets to the heart of why I’m so interested in this market.

There is plenty of debate about how quickly enterprises are really adopting AI.

But perhaps the bigger question is:

Who actually gets it from pilot into production, and delivers a measurable business outcome?

Increasingly, that’s the market forming around Forward Deployed Engineering.

Still researching. Still learning. But the signals are getting harder to ignore.

19/08/2026

The $500k+ Forward Deployed Engineer market is emerging.

And we’re only at the beginning.

Typical US FDE base salaries are already sitting around $150k–$220k, with 84% of roles offering equity.

But the top end is where things get interesting.

The very best FDEs combine elite engineering with something much harder to find: the ability to get inside a customer, understand the problem and make AI actually work in production.

That combination is becoming incredibly valuable.

At MBN, we’re going deep on this market , mapping the best FDE talent globally and working with some of the most exciting AI companies building deployment teams.

AI Builders | AI Deployment | AI Leadership

AITalent

17/08/2026

We won a Tier 1 supplier position with a major UK infrastructure organisation last week. But it was the reason we won it that mattered most to us.

This is a large, complex enterprise delivering some of the UK’s most significant infrastructure programmes , where access to genuinely specialist AI and data talent matters.

And after a competitive supplier review, the feedback was that MBN’s depth of knowledge, network and understanding of the specialist challenges across AI, data and analytics stood out.

That’s exactly where we want to be.

We’re not looking for volume recruitment.

Good internal talent teams can find good people for the majority of roles, and we have no interest in pretending otherwise.

Give us the difficult ones.

The Head of AI search where there might only be 20 genuinely credible people in the market.

The Forward Deployed Engineer who combines serious technical capability with the ability to sit inside a customer and make AI actually work.

The Applied AI leader who has built and deployed systems at scale rather than just talked about them.

The senior data hire that can materially change the direction of a business.

Those are the assignments we want.

We’ve spent nearly 20 years building MBN around specialist data, analytics and AI markets.

Twenty years building networks.

Twenty years learning the technology and the people behind it.

Twenty years speaking to practitioners, building communities, running events, creating content and understanding where the market is going next.

That investment should mean something.

It should mean that when your internal talent team has exhausted the obvious routes, you can call MBN for the search that really matters.

We don’t need 100 vacancies.

We’d rather partner on a small number of genuinely important searches where knowledge, network and ex*****on make the difference.

So, if you’re building an AI or data capability and there’s a role on your org chart that you already know is going to be difficult to fill…

That’s probably the conversation we want to have.

AI Builders | AI Deployment | AI Leadership