Amazon is investing $1 billion to create AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, a new team of AI engineers who will work directly within client organizations to build and launch AI agent systems in “days instead of months.”
This move has finally cemented the position of Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) as the hottest and most desirable specialty in today's tech industry.
Amazon is investing $1 billion to create AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, a new team of AI engineers who will work directly within client organizations to build and launch AI agent systems in “days instead of months.”
This move has finally cemented the position of Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) as the hottest and most desirable specialty in today's tech industry.
Among the first clients of the new division are the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, NBA, NFL, Ricoh and Southwest Airlines, Amazon said, Business Insider reports .
This announcement highlights the rapid rise in popularity of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), a position that was once a niche but has now become one of the hottest jobs in enterprise AI.
“Forward-deployed engineers or similar positions are about to become one of the most in-demand roles in technology. And it’s one of the most important roles for AI adoption,” Box CEO Aaron Levy wrote on LinkedIn in May.
The hiring boom is a testament to this. The number of vacancies for Forward-deployed engineers has increased by over 700% in the past year. Companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, Stripe, and Google Cloud have significantly expanded their hiring for this role.
This role was popularized by Palantir: an engineer is sent to work directly with a client to create software that meets their exact needs. It's a cross between software development, consulting, and product integration.
Kanav Bhatnagar, senior forward-deployed engineer at Rippling, previously told Business Insider that instead of building products remotely, he works directly with clients and learns how their businesses work before customizing AI systems to their workflows.
“My number one priority is to listen to customers and understand their problems,” Bhatnagar noted, adding that he spends about the same amount of time both writing code and collaborating with product development teams.
OpenAI created its own forward-deployed engineering team after realizing that customers needed more than just access to models. Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference last year, Oliver Jay, managing director of global affairs, said the company hired engineers to work directly on customers’ largest AI projects because it was “a really powerful way to accelerate the adoption of advanced AI into full-scale business solutions.”
An analysis of job openings on Indeed shows that salaries for Forward-deployed engineers typically range from $170,000 to $200,000 per year. However, OpenAI was offering such specialists in the US a base salary of up to $345,000 per year in 2025, excluding options.
