Atlassian has 46 forward deployed engineers and plans to reach 100 by Q3

Atlassian published a profile of its Forward Deployed Engineering team on October 7. The company says it now has 46 FDEs across the US, EMEA and India and is "moving quickly towards 100 by the third quarter." The team has worked with more than 100 enterprise customers and put over 80 AI agents into production.

The program started as a small pilot late last year and got a major US expansion in June. It is open to selected enterprise Cloud customers using Rovo, usually starts through an account executive or customer success manager, and begins with in-person discovery before the FDE picks one or two high-value use cases to build. Examples cited include Expedia archiving 600,000 Confluence pages and a financial institution reaching a working agent in a secure sandbox in under three weeks.

Paavany Jayanty, who leads AI Forward Deployed Engineering in the US, stresses that FDEs are not consultants and that field learnings are fed back into Atlassian's product teams. She also argues that "every PM or engineer should be an FDE at some point. I think it should be mandatory."

Why it matters: Atlassian roughly doubling its FDE headcount is a concrete hiring signal from a software company outside the AI labs, and its framing of the role as R&D work tied to product, not a services line, is useful context for engineers weighing FDE offers.