60% of surveyed Indian firms eye forward deployed engineers

What the report found

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) work directly with a client to understand a business problem, then build, connect and run a technology solution until it works reliably in production. A new report by Scaler and CyberMedia Research (CMR), reported by The Economic Times, says enterprise demand for this role is rising in India.

According to the report, 88% of enterprises expect to need more FDE skills by the end of the decade, while 60% intend to recruit FDEs or people with similar skills over the coming year. Among multinational companies, that share rises to 77%. Yet only 1% of the engineers surveyed currently hold an explicit FDE role. Moneycontrol reported that the study surveyed 1,000 software engineers plus 200 enterprise technology decision-makers in eight metros and some Tier-II cities.

Deployment skills are the gap

The hardest skills to find are not coding skills. As per the report, 77% of enterprises rate production deployment as important, but only 19% say such candidates are available. Customer engagement shows a similar gap, at 61% against 25%. By contrast, 78% of enterprises say general software engineering talent is easy to find.

That is changing how candidates are assessed. Some 51% of enterprises would rather hand FDE candidates a real deployment or troubleshooting problem, while only 24% would put a coding test first. Among engineers, 37% said a lack of customer-facing experience holds them back and 32% pointed to weak artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) skills.

The idea is not entirely new. The report says 56% of enterprises already have engineers doing FDE-like work under other titles, and 47% plan to grow this capability by upskilling their own staff. HCL Technologies (HCLTech) also said earlier this month that it is training engineers for forward-deployed roles, Moneycontrol reported.

Why it matters for job seekers

The role rewards people who can take a working solution to a real customer, not just write code.

• Expect hands-on assessments: be ready to debug or deploy a small system during selection, since half of the enterprises surveyed prefer that over a coding test.
• Show production experience: describe one project you took from a prototype to something people actually used, and what broke along the way.
• Build customer-facing evidence: client demos, support rotations or requirement-gathering work help close the most cited gap.
• If you're a fresher, consider starting in a related engineering role first, because only 8% of enterprises in the survey are open to FDE candidates with under three years of experience, and employers mostly prefer three to five years.

Audience note: India. The figures come from a survey by technology education company Scaler, which offers an FDE training programme, and CyberMedia Research (CMR); the sources do not give fieldwork dates. As with any vendor-led survey, read them alongside other hiring data.