Anthropic's partnership leads say the best FDEs know agentic systems, solve problems, communicate well, and stay curious

Business Insider spoke with Shambhavi Shambhavi, Anthropic's head of go-to-market strategy and operations for partnerships, and Steve Corfield, its head of global business development and partnerships, about the company's $100 million push to train 10,000 "Frontier Deployed Engineers" by the end of 2027.

Shambhavi named four traits in the best FDEs: familiarity with agentic AI systems, strong problem-solving, excellent communication, and real engineering experience. Corfield added a fifth, being "super, super curious." Shambhavi called communication especially important, because whole-workflow agentic projects turn on handling the people involved inside the customer.

The article also explains how the program runs. Companies nominate engineers and Anthropic interviews them. Accepted engineers do a four-day on-site intensive building and deploying an agentic system in a simulated environment, take a practical test, and then spend 12 weeks back at their own companies with Anthropic mentors. The first cohorts started in New York and San Francisco, with engineers from Accenture, Bain, Novo Nordisk and other organizations. Anthropic says its assessments, which are still being built, will focus on articulation, problem solving and coding.

Why it matters for FDEs: this is one of the clearest public statements from an AI lab of what it screens for in deployment engineers. Communication and curiosity get the same weight as coding, and the nomination-plus-interview model suggests that internal FDE credentials at large customers and consultancies may become a new way into the role.