Amazon is putting $1 billion into AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, whose staff will sit inside client organizations and get agentic AI systems running in what the company promises will be days instead of months. The first customers include Southwest Airlines, Cox Automotive, Ricoh, the NBA, the NFL, and the Allen Institute. Palantir popularized the role, which falls somewhere among engineering, consulting, and deployment work, and demand for it has climbed since January 2025 as companies find they can get AI projects into pilots but not into production. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Google Cloud have each expanded hiring. Indeed postings analyzed by Business Insider put typical pay at $170,000 to $200,000, though OpenAI has advertised US roles paying as much as $345,000 in base salary.
