You may have been hearing a lot of buzz lately about the role of forward deployed engineer (FDE) as a career option. But how viable an option is it? Among industry experts, opinions are mixed.

The number of job postings with the job title "forward deployed engineer," tracked through 2025, grew by 1,165% over the previous year, according to estimates compiled by Henley Wing Chiu, chief technology officer of Revealera. Top responsibilities of FDEs include working directly with customers, building and deploying AI and machine-learning systems, and integrating systems and APIs.

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FDEs embed themselves with customers and users, helping promote and implement AI. "Forward-deployed engineering is a strong path for people who want to work closer to real customer problems," said Shruti Tyagi, senior manager of problem management at ServiceNow. "In enterprise AI, the challenge is often not just building the AI solution. It is making it work inside existing workflows, security requirements, approval processes, data issues, and adoption challenges."

However, one prominent AI expert says FDEs have limited roles, and the broader emerging category of AI engineers has the most career potential for tech professionals. AI engineers are actually where AI-driven job growth is taking place, argues Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, chairman and co-founder of Coursera, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

FDEs may lock organizations into single vendors and models, whereas AI engineers operate within a broader realm, Ng stated in a recent post. "Right now, I see surging demand for AI engineers who can build software applications using AI software components (like LLM prompts, agentic frameworks, evals, etc.) and effectively use AI coding agents (like Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, and OpenCode)."