Be one of
India's First Forward Deployed Engineers
PGP in FDE & Applied AI Solutions
8
Months
Months
4.7%
Acceptance rate
Acceptance rate
Built and
taught by FDEs
taught by FDEs
Forward Deploy Your Career
60% of business tasks are becoming AI-driven, stay relevant!
The demand for this role is Exploding
800%+
Job postings for forward-deployed engineers increased by more than 800% in 2025.
Who is a Forward Deployed Engineer?
This Forward Deployed Engineer role combines building, deploying, and owning AI systems. It spans software, platforms, and solutions. It exists to make AI work beyond demos.
Understand how the FDE Work Cycle operates
Bridging business needs and AI execution.
70% AI pilots are failing
and FDEs are the answer to bridge this gap
World’s First And Only Structured Pathway To Become An Forward Deployed Engineer.
Built and taught by real FDEs who deploy AI systems in the real world.
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The rarest hire in AI.
The first program built for them.
Earned, Not Enrolled
Admission is selective. The cohort is
capped at 80 seats and built around
readiness, not applications received.
Ever evolving curriculum
The syllabus tracks how AI delivery work is actually changing, not a fixed catalogue to the Curriculum evolves with market demands and updates
Pods, Precisely Curated
You're grouped by experience, industry, and technical depth. Every pod is curated to stretch how you think.
Real Briefs. Real Constraints. Nothing Simulated
Real deployments from Stripe, Salesforce, Razorpay, and more*.
The blocks that structure your learning
Technical
Capability
Consulting
Capability
32 Week Curriculum
four connected phases and an end-to-end capstone
CURRICULUM
32 weeks: from a clear problem to a working system
01
Foundations
Learn the language and working habits of production AI.
WEEKS 1–4
Technical
Python, Git, workflows, modern AI tooling, prompting patterns,APIs and basic system design.
CONSULTING
Understand the business problem, ask better questions, clarify success and frame an AI use case that can be tested.
You produce: A first working AI tool, a clear problem statement and an initial solution outline.
02
Core build
Move from individual tools to a dependable application.
WEEKS 5–12
Technical
LLM applications and workflows, context engineering, RAG foundations, early evaluation, reliability and application-layer patterns.
CONSULTING
Requirement discovery, PRDs, solution design documents and clear communication of scope, choices and trade-offs.
You produce: A deployable AI system, an architecture view and a record of the key design decisions
03
Deployment depth
Work through the conditions in which promising AI systems often fail.
WEEKS 13–20
Technical
Advanced retrieval and RAG, evaluation, monitoring, iteration, scale, reliability, security and failure handling.
CONSULTING
Stakeholder alignment, delivery planning, iteration cycles and the management of feedback, scope change and competing constraints.
You produce: A production-oriented system, deployment-ready documentation and a clearownership narrative.
04
Capstone and mastery
Run one engagement end to end and defend it in front of a panel.
WEEKS 21–32
Technical
By demo week you can run one engagement end to end: MCP tools, policies, a production deployment, a multi-agent design and an SLM you trained and served.
CONSULTING
End-to-End Engagement Simulation and Case Study Writing with Capstone Presentation Rehearsal
You produce: Projects 5 and 6, five written case studies, a portfolio narrative, and a capstone system demonstrated live to the evaluation panel.
THE CAPSTONE
The capstone begins with a client brief the learner has not seen before. The learner has to find the real problem, choose an approach, build a working system, respond when requirements change and defend the handover.
The ever-evolving programme
Apr 2026
Cohort 1 Opens
The 32-week program begins. Technical and consulting tracks run side by side from day one.
June 2026
The Cadence Tightens
Weekly content, mentor support, and live industry leader sessions are refined based on what Cohort 1 needed.
Aug 2026
A Track for Senior Engineers
A 20-week fast-track is added for experienced engineers who don't need the full 32 weeks.
Sep 2026
Client Zero
Every learner now works the same simulated client, across every session, toward one real engagement.
Sep 2026
More Ways to Learn
Extra office hours, a shared code repository, and ready-made study material are added around the core program.
next cohort
Six additions.
One programme that keeps moving.
01
Your work sets your level
A baseline diagnostic in Week 2 reads your work, never your résumé,and places you as a Builder, Navigator or Accelerator on the technical spine. The read repeats every six to eight weeks at each module transition, and learners move in both directions.
What changes for you →
Your route adapts as your capability changes.
02
Two rooms. Twice a week.
Monday and Friday evenings now carry two parallel rooms. Officehours take the doubts of the week and re-run any concept that 20 to30 percent of the room did not get. Accelerator hours put learnerswho already build agents onto live company problems one leveldeeper than the core spine.
What changes for you →
Support when you need it. Depth when you're ready.
03
The four-loop tech spine
The tech spine is now built as four passes through the same fivestations (discover, design, build, validate, deliver), each pass one leveldeeper: a basic agent on LangChain and AgentCore, an agent withenterprise RAG, a stateful and interoperable agent on LangGraph withMCP and LLMOps, and a multi-agent and on-premise pass ithCrewAI, Agno and small-model fine-tuning.
What changes for you →
You revisit the full build cycle at a higher level each time.
04
The Honours (Advanced) Track
A 20-week senior spine runs in fully hands-on chunk-demo format: demo in chunks, scenario hallenges, extend, feed a project. Three connected company cases compound into one capstone and the full plan is floated on day one. Placement on the Honours Track is decided by admissions evidence of what a candidate has built, broken and been bothered by, never by years alone.
What changes for you →
Senior depth is earned through evidence, not tenure.
05
The GitHub Cohort hub
Everything academic moves to a rivate GitHub hub per cohort: a iscussion board in the Stack verflow pattern where peers and coaches answer and the best nswer is accepted, a project board for pod tasks, a wiki with how-tos and a newsletter on agentic advances, an interview question bank collected rom practising FDEs, and one case study per week with a suggested olution from the FDE board.
What changes for you →
Tuesday’s doubts are answered by Friday, becoming part of the cohort’s shared knowledge.
THE COHORT
The top 4% you'll be joining
Companies they represent
The Market Told Us
What's Missing
We partnered with AIM Research to ask top tech companies what they need, want, and can't find. Here's a snapshot of what came back.
Built & Taught By Real FDEs
Mohm. Rashid Raza
Adobe
Forward Deployed Engineer
Imtiaz Ahamed
HighRadius
Forward Deployed Engineer
Ishank Sharma
Prentis AI
Forward Deployed Engineer
Mariya Baig
Bluecore
Forward Deployed Engineer
Ketuman Vishwakarma
Bluecore
Forward Deployed Engineer
Apoorv Dubey
Echos
Forward Deployed AI Engineer
Animesh Das
Realfast
Forward Deployed Engineer
Saurabh Ranjan
Shadgunya Technology
Forward Deployed Engineer
Prajna Vegesna
Sarvam
Forward Deployed Engineer
Poojitha Rachuri
Confido Health
Forward Deployed Engineer
Jiya Goel
Databook
Forward Deployed Engineer
Pankaj Jaiswal
Supervity
Forward Deployed Engineer
Tithi Agarwal
Athena Intelligence
Forward Deployed Engineer
Deepanshu
Heizen
Forward Deployed Engineer
Animesh
Realfast
Forward Deployed Engineer
Gourav Kushwaha
Prompt ql
Forward Deployed Engineer
Nachiketa Jha
KRIM
Forward Deployed Engineer
Subham Ghosh
PromptQL
Forward Deployed Engineer
Rushikesh Akhare
Luminai
Lead FDE
Prem Shah
AIStudio
Forward Deployed Engineer
Vishnu Sanketh
Valiance Solutions
Forward Deployed Engineer
Mrinal Raj
Mercor
Forward Deployed Engineer
Mentored By AI Industry Leaders
Biju Kalleppilli
SAP Labs
Senior director of Engineering
Ashutosh Shinde
PayU
Director, Software Engineering
Arpit Agarwal
Data Science Manager
Gaurav Srivastava
Amazon
Analytics Business Intelligence
Ashish Kulkarni
Kritrum
Director Applied AI
Vidhi Chugh
All About Scale
Head of AI
Nishant Chandra
Microsoft
Industry Copilot Leader & Head
Ruchika Singh
Spotify
Director, Data Science & Insights
Krithika Muthukrishnan
Scripbox
Chief Data Science Officer
Sumon Maal
SonyLiv
Director Engineering
Tushar Sahu
Director Engineering
Vishal Nagpal
Best Buy
Director of Data & A
Indrani Goswami
Nykaa
Associate Director
Anirban Nandi
Albertsons Companies India
Vice President, AI and Data
Srini Oduru
Kearney
Head of IT Delivery & Operations
Swati Jain
Deloitte
Partner, Digital AI & Analytics
Madhu Hosadurga
Schneider Electric
Global VP, Enterprise A
Nithya Subramanian
Best Buy
Sr Director Data & AI COE
Pankaj Rai
Aditya Birla Management
Group Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Ishu Jain
Myntra
Head of Central Analytics
Shrirsha Ray
Thomson Reuters
Director of Engineering
Muthumari S
Brillio
Global Head of Data & AI Studio
Ankit Mogra
Ather Energy
Director - Insights & Analytics
Anand Das
TVS Motors
Chief Digital & AI Officer
FDE Lab is the proprietary learning system behind the FDE Academy.
Perplexity Research Engine
Multi-step research, source validation, citations Stack: Claude Opus, Firecrawl, Pinecone
Intercom Support Automation
Ticket routing, sentiment analysis, 15+ languages Stack: GPT-4o, Semantic Router, Qdrant
Cursor Code Assistant
Context-aware completions, PR reviews Stack: Codestral, Continue.dev, Ollama
Stripe Webhook Infrastructure
10K events/sec with retries, idempotency Stack: Inngest, Trigger.dev, Upstash
The Founding Summit
Where the first generation of FDEs comes together
Exchange real-world insights on deploying AI in production
CAREER PATHWAYS
Eligible roles & salary range
Career Acceleration, Backed by Futurense
Helping you transition into high-impact Forward Deployed and Applied AI roles.
Remote Opportunities
Palantir
Open AI
Ramp
Salesforce
Databricks
Scale AI
Adobe
Servicenow
Palantir
Open AI
Ramp
Salesforce
Databricks
Scale AI
Adobe
Servicenow
India Opportunities
4.7%
Admission Process
This program is selective. Great learning comes from great peers. We choose individuals who raise the standard for themselves and for the room.
Application
(Screening)
Proficiency Test
(Online)
Interview Prep
(Post-Test)
Technical Interview
(Up to 2 hours)
FDE Board Decision
(Final)
Eligibility
4-Year Degree with Maths
AI/ML Foundations (via coursework, certification, or projects)
Cloud Exposure (AWS /GCP /Azure cert or deployed project)
2+ Years Technical Experience (or exceptional fresher)
Clear Technical Communication (can explain concepts to non-technical audiences)
Strong Python or SQL (numpy, pandas, or strong coding ability)
Frequently Asked Questions
We know you might have some questions before getting started in our platform.
Can FDE Academy help us hire AI engineers?
Yes. FDE Academy provides access to a curated pool of pre-vetted Forward Deployed Engineers and AI Engineers who are trained to work on production-grade AI systems, enterprise integrations, LLM applications, RAG pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and AI-native software development.
Who is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)?
A Forward Deployed Engineer is responsible for making AI work inside real organizations, owning outcomes from deployment to adoption until systems become stable, trusted, and business-critical.
Can you train our existing engineering team?
Absolutely. We offer customized enterprise training programs that help software engineers transition into Forward Deployed Engineers through hands-on projects, AI-native development practices, production deployment, system design, and enterprise architecture.
What makes FDE Academy different from typical AI programs?
Most programs optimize for certification.
FDE Academy optimizes for capability and ownership.
The focus is not topic completion, it is preparing engineers to deploy, own, and scale AI systems under real-world constraints.
How was the curriculum built?
The curriculum is grounded in real Forward Deployed work, drawing on insights from 160+ FDE roles and inputs from practicing engineers, hiring teams, and employers; ensuring alignment with what production-ready engineers are expected to deliver.
What is FDE Lab™️?
FDE Lab™️ is the proprietary learning system behind the program, built on a continuous loop:
Learn → Apply → Build
Learn production patterns
Apply them to realistic company scenarios
Build end-to-end systems evaluated for real-world readiness
Every build is measured against one question: “Would this survive inside a real organization?”
Why is the program dual-track (Technical Track + Consulting Track)?
Real AI deployment demands both technical expertise and execution ownership.
Technical Track: Architecture, evaluation, monitoring, reliability, and deployment patterns.
Consulting Track: Problem discovery, solution design, stakeholder alignment, delivery, and feedback loops.
Both tracks run in parallel throughout the program reflecting how Forward Deployed Engineers operate in production environments.
What is the weekly time commitment?
The program follows a structured cadence with live weekday sessions and deeper weekend builds.
Typical commitment is ~14–18 hours per week, depending on the phase. The rigor is intentional because the role demands it.
Is the program selective? What is the selection process?
Yes, the program is intentionally selective to maintain a high-caliber cohort.
The process includes:
1. Proficiency test
2. Technical interview
3. Field readiness evaluation
4. Final FDE Board decision
We assess aptitude and ownership potential not just current skill levels.
What do learners graduate with?
Graduates complete a deployment-ready portfolio, reviewed code, architecture artifacts, and a capstone demonstrating end-to-end ownership.
Learners also receive:
PGP Certification from FDE Academy
Professional Certification in association with respective IIT
Lifetime access to a role-specific FDE community