800% jump in postings for a new kind of AI role: forward-deployed engineers (www.interviewquery.com)

Job listings for a new hybrid role called forward-deployed engineer (FDE) have surged more than 800% from January to September 2025, reflecting a broader shift in AI hiring from research toward real-world deployment. Companies led by Palantir—including newcomers like OpenAI (building a ~50-person FDE team) and Cohere—are embedding these engineers inside customer and product teams to tailor large models into production-ready workflows. FDEs don’t just write code; they live with a single customer, use enterprise AI stacks, collaborate with deployment strategists, and iterate software in operational environments (example: customizing tools for agricultural machinery), closing the “last mile” between prototypes and usable systems. The spike matters because many AI projects fail to create business value—an MIT-linked finding cited a very high failure rate—and organizations that have spent heavily on LLMs and cloud AI now need practitioners who can translate models into measurable outcomes. Technically, the role emphasizes systems integration, prompt-and-model tuning, data pipeline and workflow engineering, observability, and continuous feedback loops with users. For engineers, the trend signals that domain fluency, customer-facing problem solving, and production engineering are now as valuable as core ML skills; for the industry, it marks a move from experimentation to scalable AI operations.