Will 2026 be the year of the forward deployed engineer?

The tech industry is scrambling to hire forward deployed engineers (FDEs, for short), one of the latest roles to gain a newfound popularity in the AI era.

An FDE is a software engineer who works alongside customers to understand their specific business needs and to help customize or build software solutions to address those needs. Deepak Anchala, CEO of Adopt AI, told IT Brew that Palantir Technologies was the company that “kicked off” the role and made it mainstream: “The role was you’d have to go and customize Palantir’s solutions to meet [customer] needs because that’s what large customers want. They want customization.”

Lightcast data provided to IT Brew shows Palantir was the top company behind job listings for FDEs between 2010 and 2025, followed by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Salesforce.

Aaron Zelinger, co-founder and CEO of software company Closure and a former Palantir FDE, told IT Brew that FDEs act as a technical bridge between customers, users, and the “mothership,” and can eliminate a “bureaucratic layer” of sales and account managers by having engineers on the frontlines with clients.

“What the FDE role is really doing is…customer discovery, understanding their pain points on the ground level, without the non-technical filter that sometimes reduces our understanding of the customer,” Zelinger said.

“They’re not just customer support or solutions engineers. They are not consultants. They are not doing short-term or hacky things,” he added.

Why are FDEs seemingly everywhere now? According to Lightcast, there were 922 job postings for FDEs as of November 2025, a fivefold increase from the same period a year prior. Sanai Quick, a spokesperson for Indeed, added in an emailed statement to IT Brew that postings for the FDE role rose sharply since April.

Anchala attributed the sudden popularity of the FDE role to the AI boom and the desire for highly customized products.

“In the AI world, you do need forward deployed engineers to go and implement and customize stuff before it’s ready for use,” Anchala said, adding that if FDEs aren’t the fastest growing role in AI at the moment, he believes it will be down the line.

Zelinger added that the hype around the FDE role may come from startups trying to “pattern match” Palantir’s FDE strategy, “regardless of whether or not it’s the right decision for their business.”

“The real need for this role is that because software is moving so quickly and because the cost of building software has gone down so much, we can’t wait for the traditional…product feature cycle to go in its normal course,” Zelinger said. “It just takes too long to build something if you’re building that way.”

What makes a good FDE? Adopt AI is one of the companies currently expanding its FDE team. Anchala said the company looks for slightly different skills in FDEs compared to traditional software engineers.

“We need people who have a decent understanding of all of the AI tools, [who are] very inquisitive, who have good communication skills because you’re talking to customers all the time, and who have decent technical chops,” he said, adding that the ideal candidates are local to their clients.

Justin Pines, director of client enablement at AI-powered health tech company Cedar, a longtime proponent of FDEs, told IT Brew that FDEs should be adept at “working across different client teams to understand that context and shape” of business problems.

Are traditional engineers in trouble? Pines and Zelinger believe the rise of FDEs won’t displace the need for traditional engineers. However, Zelinger said FDEs could threaten the need for nontechnical roles like product marketing managers and account representatives.

“A question that every startup faces is ‘When to hire sales people?’ and I think the old school answer was maybe to hire them relatively early,” Zelinger said. “But, if you have a charismatic, thoughtful FDE that you can go and live with the customer and understand their problems deeply, does the customer start to prefer that than having a filter layer with an account executive? That’s an open question.”