New IT career paths in the GenAI and agents era: FDE and beyond

The honest headline is this: the new IT career paths in the GenAI and agents era are not about writing more code faster. They reward a different thing entirely, the judgement to decide what should be built and the fluency to build it with AI. The flagship of these new roles is the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), but it is one of a cluster, and understanding the whole cluster helps you choose where you actually fit rather than chasing whichever title is loudest on LinkedIn this month.

Let me walk you through the landscape, and then how to pick.

What are the new roles opening up?

Several roles have appeared or sharpened in the last two years, each sitting where AI now does the routine work and humans do the harder thinking.

• Forward Deployed Engineer — the flagship. An engineer embedded in a customer's team, mostly customer-facing, building a working fix for one customer at a time. Think of it as a good doctor, for a business: enquire, diagnose, fix, observe.
• Agentic AI Engineer — designs and builds the autonomous agent systems that now carry out multi-step work, and keeps them reliable.
• AI Evaluation Engineer — the person who decides whether an AI system is actually good enough, and proves it. As AI output grows, judging it well becomes its own craft.
• AI Platform Engineer — builds the infrastructure and tooling that lets a whole organisation use AI safely and repeatably.
• AI Security specialist — handles the new attack surfaces that AI systems open up, from data leakage to prompt-level exploits.
• Responsible AI / Governance — makes sure what gets built is fair, compliant and defensible, which matters more as regulation catches up.
• AI Adoption & Enablement — helps real teams actually change how they work, which is usually harder than the technology itself.

Each of these is a genuine path, not a rebrand of an old one.

What is the common thread?

Strip away the titles and the same two things run through all of them: problem-space judgement and AI fluency, over routine coding. The scarce skill is no longer typing out a function, AI does a great deal of that now. The scarce skill is knowing which problem is worth solving, deciding what good looks like, and owning whether it actually worked in the real world. Every role above lives closer to that question than to the keyboard.

This is also why the FDE sits at the centre of the cluster. It compresses what used to be five separate jobs, business analyst, architect, programmer, tester and DevOps engineer, into one person, with AI augmenting each. The others specialise around the edges of that same shift. If you understand why the FDE exists, you understand why all of them do.

Why are these roles growing while fresher hiring shrinks?

Because the demand is relocating, not disappearing. At the entry level the picture is genuinely hard: entry-level tech openings in India are down roughly 44% year on year, and at one of the country's largest firms the share of under-30 employees has fallen to about 50.7%, the lowest in fifteen years. AI is absorbing the routine work that used to be a fresher's first job.

But that same force is lifting the problem-space roles. FDE hiring in India has grown around 130% over the past year, even if the numbers are still small, a few dozen organisations hiring, barely over a thousand fully-qualified people in the country. So the ladder has not been removed, its bottom rungs have moved. The work now rewards people who can operate above routine execution, and that is exactly where this new cluster sits. I will not dress that up as easy, it is a real adjustment, but it is a direction you can move with rather than against.

How do I choose a path by fit?

Honestly, and from the inside out. Do not pick the role with the biggest reported salary; pick the one whose daily work you could do for years without resenting it.

• If you light up sitting with a customer, untangling a messy business problem and owning the fix end to end, look hard at the FDE.
• If you love building the machinery, agents, platforms, infrastructure, the Agentic AI or Platform paths may fit better.
• If you are the person who always asks "but is this actually correct, and is it safe?", Evaluation, Security or Governance may be your home.

None of these is a title you buy with a weekend course. Each is a transformation of how you work. If you want a clear, honest map of the flagship path, the Decoding FDE workshop lays it out. And if you are genuinely unsure which direction fits you, that is exactly what a 1-1 counselling session is for, a compass, not a cheerleader.

FAQ

Which new IT role is the most in demand in India right now?

The Forward Deployed Engineer is the clearest signal, with hiring up around 130% year on year, though supply is tiny, barely over a thousand fully-qualified people. The others, Agentic AI, Platform, Evaluation, Security and Governance roles, are growing too. Treat all this as a direction the market is moving, not a guarantee of a job for any one person.

Do these roles mean software engineering is dead?

No. Software engineering is changing, not ending. The routine parts AI now handles are becoming commoditised, while the parts needing judgement, customer understanding and ownership are rising in value. These new roles are where that value is concentrating, so the smart move is to grow toward them rather than to panic.

I am a fresher. Can I start in one of these roles?

Rarely straight away, because most ask for some experience. The realistic path is to join at the entry tier as an engineer and deliberately build the problem-space and AI skills these roles reward, so you become the obvious internal candidate. "The Resilient IT Professional" book is written for sequencing exactly this kind of early-career decision.

How do I know which path actually fits me?

Look at the daily work, not the title or the pay. Which of these would you still enjoy after the novelty wears off, sitting with customers, building agents, or judging whether systems are safe and correct? Answer that honestly first. A grounded 1-1 counselling conversation can help you test your answer against reality.