On Thursday, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian issued a call for “forward-deployed engineers” to apply for jobs in the company’s go-to-market AI team. Their task: help non-tech organizations scale up their AI deployments.
That term — forward-deployed engineers, FDE for short — has been coming up a lot lately in conversations with CTOs, software engineers, and experts tracking the technology and job markets.
Google currently has 1,513 openings for that specific role and OpenAI, which just this week launched an organization called the Deployment Company, has 31. Microsoft is on board, too; in March, it partnered with Accenture to launch a forward-deployment partnership.
OpenAI’s new Deployment Company is, not surprisingly, designed to “help organizations build and deploy AI systems they can rely on every day across their most important work,” the company said in a blog post.
Forward-deployed engineering has seen the fastest growth in jobs created by AI, with the number of positions increasing 42-fold between 2023 and 2025, LinkedIn reported in a study earlier this year. (AI engineer jobs, by comparison, have grown 13-fold in that same time frame.)
