Demand for forward deployed engineers surges as companies adopt AI

Demand for forward deployed engineers is soaring as enterprises and AI firms seek specialists who can bridge business needs and accelerate AI adoption

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs), dubbed the hottest job in tech today, are seeing surging demand in India as enterprises race to embed artificial intelligence (AI) more seamlessly into client workflows.

 

A term made popular by US data analytics company Palantir, FDEs are software engineers embedded directly within the customer ecosystem to configure the technology company’s software to solve problems for the client.

 

They are not traditional enterprise architects but work in the client environment to facilitate AI platform adoption and bring huge domain expertise to command what can be built across the client’s technology stack.

 

They also connect business objectives to technical implementation and design solutions using proven assets and patterns.

 

 

Data from TeamLease Digital shows demand is growing at high double-digit rates, and in the first three quarters of 2025 alone, FDE job demand jumped by nearly 800 per cent.

 

This is albeit from a small base but a clear indicator of how critical this role has become.

 

Globally, there are about 500-800 active roles at any given time with India having 250-270 open positions, making it an emerging hub.

 

As enterprises continue to witness slow adoption of AI due to a host of factors, many software and frontier model firms are looking to hire more such niche skilled engineers who would scale up adoption, ensure quicker turnaround, and better revenue.

 

Mid-tier IT services firm Coforge, which has 20 such engineers now, wants to increase the number to 100 by the end of this financial year, its chief executive officer (CEO) and executive director (ED) Sudhir Singh said earlier this month.  

 

He added, “They are the cherry on the cake. That's the plan, going forward. And, a forward deployed engineer, given just the expectation from them, that's a skill set that is going to be gold. If we get to that number, we'll be very satisfied.”

 

US software company EPAM Systems has about 50 such engineers in India and is also looking to scale that number to 100 during the same time period. 

 

“The reason FDEs are prevailing today is they can have a good collaboration with business and they understand what business is talking. That reduces ideations. At the same time, the cost of tokens in an enterprise is increasing exponentially. With the help of FDEs, it will be lesser iterations, lesser costs, and more of the value which industry is expecting,” said Srinivasa Kattuboina, vice-president of data and analytics practice at EPAM India.

 

When asked about the skills required, Kattuboina said the engineer “needs to have expertise in AI. You should have a good deal of data background or exposure to data, and then you should know the domain side.”

 

Neeti Sharma, CEO of TeamLease Digital, says the two critical skills needed from such engineers are domain expertise and AI skills with experienced people making about ~40 lakh per annum. “FDEs earn 23.7 per cent above customer support engineers and 16 per cent above technical account managers,” she added.

 

Most of the hiring for this role is still being done by the frontier model firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, followed by enterprise software firms which include Palantir, Salesforce, Snowflake, ServiceNow, and Oracle, besides professional services companies like PwC.

 

Google Cloud is also investing in hiring more FDEs to scale enterprise AI adoption. “While having FDEs is not new for Google Cloud, the demand from customers and partners for Google enterprise AI products and Google engineers to help them embrace agent development is growing very rapidly,” CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in LinkedIn.