Forward Deployed AI Engineering · India

Engineers who take AI from prototype to production — inside your team.

AI-native Forward Deployed Engineers who have already worked the failure modes: legacy data, retrieval that misses, agents that loop, evals that catch it before your users do.

Two ways to staff the work

Most teams need one senior who can own the system, and capacity underneath. We supply both, and we are explicit about which is which.

Lead offer · 2–6 years, AI-native

Forward Deployed AI Engineers

Engineers who sit inside your team and take an AI system from prototype to production — legacy data, hybrid retrieval, stateful agents, evals and cost. They have delivered against the failure modes, not just the tutorials.

The job, in proportion: 50% full-stack systems · 30% applied AI, RAG and agents · 20% client advisory

Use when: A product that has to work in front of real users, on real enterprise data.

Early career, assessed

Trained AI engineers

Graduates and career-switchers who have completed the same curriculum and passed the same scored assessment. Supervised by an FDE on delivery, so they are productive inside a team rather than left to find their own way.

How they deploy: Deployed in a pod with an FDE lead, or hired direct through hire-train-deploy

Use when: Volume programmes where cost per seat matters and there is a senior to supervise.

Trained on real failures

The curriculum is built from documented production incidents at named companies — not tutorials.

Assessed, not just taught

Every engineer passes a scored, hands-on assessment before we put them in front of you.

You interview first

We shortlist from a trained bench. You decide. Nobody starts without your yes.

Flexible engagement

Contract staffing, contract-to-hire, and hire-train-deploy.

What the training is actually made of

Our own numbers, not market forecasts. Every case study behind the curriculum was retrieved from a primary engineering source and fact-checked before it was taught.

109

verified production case studies behind the curriculum

68

companies those failures were documented at

102

mandatory hands-on scenarios before deployment

33

assessed hours in the FDE track

33 assessed hours · AAP-FDE

What a Forward Deployed Engineer has already done

Not a syllabus — a sequence of things they have built and been scored on, in the order the work actually arrives on an enterprise engagement.

Orient1 hThe FDE role and what enterprise reality actually looks like.
Plumbing5 hLegacy data and unstructured documents — the part that decides everything downstream.
Retrieve & Ground5 hHybrid retrieval and knowledge graphs, with citations that hold up.
Orchestrate6 hStateful agents and sandboxed tools, with recovery when they fail.
Verify & Protect6 hContinuous evaluation and red-teaming before anything reaches a user.
Ship & Turnaround9 hCost routing, and a 72-hour rapid MVP under a real deadline.
Certify1 hThe AAP-FDE assessment.

How hiring works

1

Tell us the role

Skills, headcount and timeline — one short form, about a minute.

2

We shortlist

Profiles with assessment scores and work samples, so you can judge before you meet anyone.

3

You interview, then they start

Your interview, your decision, your clearance process.

Request engineers See our commitments →

What we place

AI / ML Engineering

Production LLM features: RAG design, agents, fine-tuning, and the evaluation discipline that keeps them honest.

Data & AI Platform Engineering

The retrieval layer and the pipelines under it — ingestion, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, vector operations.

AI Evaluation & Reliability

Testing non-deterministic systems: eval harnesses, agent trajectories, LLM-as-judge in CI, regression gates before release.

Also available, on demand

Built to order against a confirmed requirement, rather than held on the bench.

Software EngineeringDevOps / SRE / PlatformSecurity & AI SecurityCloud & Solutions ArchitectureFrontend & MobileProduct & Analysis

Skills & tech stack

Prompt & context engineeringVerifying AI outputLLM APIs & structured outputsRAG & hybrid retrievalEvals & LLM-as-judgeAgents & MCPFine-tuning (LoRA→DPO)Embeddings & vector searchRerankingObservability & driftCost routingResponsible AI
62%

average wage premium for AI skills

PwC AI Jobs Barometer 2026

90%

of developers now use AI at work

DORA, 2025

4 of 5

fastest-growing US roles are AI roles

LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise 2026

+20%

India AI/ML hiring growth, year on year

Naukri JobSpeak, September 2026

Engagement models

Embedded FDE

One senior engineer inside your team, owning an AI system end to end.

Pod

An FDE leading two to four assessed engineers, billed per seat.

Hire-train-deploy

We source, train and deploy against your programme, with conversion to your payroll.

See engagement models →

Built for the teams who are actually hiring

Global capability centres are now the dominant buyer of contract engineering talent in India — 71% of professional staffing headcount at the market leader. What they are short of is not people. It is people who can be trusted with an AI system in production. That is the gap we train into.

Sources: Quess Corp professional staffing headcount, Q1 FY27 investor presentation; Indian Staffing Federation (IT staffing 10.1% YoY, FY26).

Tell us the role. We will show you the people.

A short brief is enough to start. We reply within one business day.