As AI reshapes the tech workforce, Amazon is making a billion-dollar bet that one engineering job is only becoming more valuable.
The company said on Thursday in its second-quarter earnings report that it will invest $1 billion to build AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, a new team of AI engineers who will work directly inside customer organizations to build and launch agentic AI systems in "days rather than months."
Early customers include the Allen Institute, Cox Automotive, the NBA, the NFL, Ricoh, and Southwest Airlines, Amazon said.
The announcement underscores the rapid rise of the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, a once-niche role that has become one of the hottest jobs in enterprise AI.
"Forward-deployed engineers, or roles that do the equivalent motion, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts," Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote on LinkedIn in May.
The hiring boom backs that up. Business Insider previously reported that job postings for forward-deployed engineers have surged since January 2025, according to Indeed data. Companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, Stripe, and Google Cloud have all expanded hiring for the role.
The position, popularized by Palantir, embeds engineers directly with customers to build software tailored to their needs. It sits somewhere between software engineering, consulting, and product deployment.
Kanav Bhatnagar, a senior forward-deployed engineer at Rippling, previously told Business Insider that instead of building products from afar, he works directly with clients and learns how their businesses operate before tailoring AI systems to fit their workflows.
"My primary job is listening to customers and understanding their problems," Bhatnagar said, adding that he spends roughly equal time coding and collaborating with product teams.
That hands-on approach has become increasingly important as companies race to deploy generative AI but struggle to move projects from pilot programs into production.
OpenAI created its own forward-deployed engineering team after realizing customers needed more than access to models. Speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference last year, international managing director Oliver Jay said the company hired engineers to work directly on customers' largest AI deployments because it was "a really specific way to advance the acceleration of advanced AI into scale production cases."
Job postings on Indeed, analyzed by Business Insider, show that forward-deployed engineering roles typically pay between about $170,000 and $200,000. OpenAI's own job listings, which Business Insider previously reviewed in November 2025, advertise US-based forward-deployed engineering positions paying up to $345,000 in base salary, excluding equity.