Not all tech jobs are disappearing.
Despite the wave of layoffs that have battered the tech industry, there’s one role that looks secure: the forward-deployed engineer.
“Forward-deployed engineers, or roles that do the equivalent motion, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts,” Box CEO Aaron Levie said on LinkedIn this week.
The job listings data suggest he may be right.
In April of last year, there were 643 job postings for forward-deployed engineering roles on Indeed, according to data shared with Business Insider. By April 2026, that number had increased to 5,330 postings, which is about a 729% increase year over year.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, and Stripe are among the tech firms hiring forward-deployed engineering talent as demand for enterprise AI tools grows.
Earlier this week, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said on LinkedIn that the company was also ramping up hiring for the position, citing growing client and partner demand for the company’s AI products.
So what exactly do these tech workers do?
Forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs as they are known, work with companies to integrate AI into workflows and customize AI tools to make their work easier or more efficient.
The role was popularized by Palantir, which would embed engineers directly with customers to build software tailored to their needs.
According to Indeed data, pay for the role ranges from about $170,000 to over $200,000.
The consulting industry is also leaning on forward-deployed engineers. Consulting has become something of a distribution channel for Silicon Valley’s latest AI innovations as they help companies make sense of AI and integrate it into their work.
For firms like McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, the ideal consultant now must have technical skills.
A job posting for a “Principal Forward Deployment Engineer” at QuantumBlack says candidates should have more than eight years of hands-on experience in software, platform, or infrastructure engineering, as well as a bachelor’s or master’s degree in a technical field such as computer science, machine learning, applied statistics, mathematics, engineering, or artificial intelligence.
“What we want to be able to do is find those people that actually have a propensity to either be this great McKinsey consultant, and or a great technologist, and then groom them to be both,” Alex Singla, a senior partner at McKinsey who co-leads its AI arm, QuantumBlack, previously told Business Insider.
