If you've been anywhere near AI job postings lately, you've seen the title: Forward-Deployed Engineer. Sometimes it's "Deployment Engineer" or "Solutions Engineer" or "Applied AI Engineer." Sarvam is hiring more than a hundred of them. Palantir built a large part of its business on them. OpenAI, Anthropic, and a long tail of AI startups are all competing for the same people. And yet, if you ask five engineers what an FDE is , you'll get five different answers. Let's fix that. T...