Forward-deployed engineers are one of the hottest jobs in AI. Finding them isn’t easy.
“These are unicorns,” Asa Kalavade, vice president of forward-deployed engineering at Amazon Web Services, told Business Insider.
Like its rivals, Amazon has made a big bet on the future of FDEs. In June, AWS announced a $1 billion investment to create a dedicated AWS FDE organization.
Popularized by Palantir, FDEs are often embedded with companies to integrate AI into their workflows and to build more customized solutions.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft have announced major initiatives in recent months to compete for the lucrative enterprise AI business. Forrester estimates that between May and July alone, the three companies and Amazon pledged roughly $9 billion to FDE-related ventures.
“FDE hiring is sort of the rage in town these days,” Kalavade said. “Everybody wants to be an FDE.”
Amazon is being selective as it builds the team, Kalavade said, initially…
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-fde-plans-hiring-2026-10
