India, Sept. 15 -- Every few years, an obscure job title from one company becomes the industry's shorthand for what it's actually worried about. This year, that title is Forward Deployed Engineer.

Palantir popularised the term over a decade ago for engineers embedded inside client organisations, building software against a client's own data and constraints instead of shipping something generic off the shelf. Now, the rest of the industry is catching up. OpenAI has launched a dedicated deployment company backed by more than $4 billion, with around 150 experienced forward deployed engineers (FDEs) and deployment specialists coming in through its acquisition of Tomoro. The demand is visible in the numbers too: FDE job postings have risen 72...