Every September 15th, India remembers Sir M. Visvesvaraya — an engineer whose work still holds up a century later. What made him worth remembering wasn’t a certificate on a wall. It was the ability to look at a genuine, unsolved problem and actually fix it. That’s still the real measure of an engineer, and it’s a standard worth holding on to.
A few months ago, “Forward Deployed Engineer” wasn’t a title most Indian engineers had even heard of. Today it’s showing up on LinkedIn feeds next to comp numbers that look like typos.
I’ve been getting the same question from students and readers lately: is this a real career path, or is it just another AI buzzword? I dug into the actual hiring data instead of just the hype threads, and here’s what I found — including whether freshers stand a real chance.
A few months ago, the mood around Indian IT hiring was grim: layoff headlines, hiring freezes, and a real sense that AI was quietly eating entry-level jobs. I covered some of that in AI Is Cutting Indian IT Jobs in 2026, where the same hiring paradox was already showing up, with fewer conventional roles even as AI-specific hiring grew.
The latest data has moved again, and it’s a more interesting story than a simple “jobs are back” headline suggests. I dug into the actual Xpheno and Naukri reports rather than just the news writeups, and the picture is genuinely mixed: good news at the top line, a harder story underneath it.
The world’s largest AI conference just wrapped up in New Delhi with over 300,000 attendees, and it delivered on three fronts: major US-India partnerships, indigenous AI product launches, and a clear signal about where tech jobs are heading.
Prime Minister Modi, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and CEOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft all showed up. But beyond the photo ops, concrete business deals were signed and actual products were unveiled.