Backbase adds 30,000 sq ft in Hyderabad, with forward deployed engineers among the roles it will house

Backbase, the Amsterdam-based company behind an AI-native banking platform used by more than 120 banks, has added 30,000 square feet of office space in Hyderabad's HITEC City. Its India team has grown from fewer than 50 engineers in 2020 to more than 600, making India its largest engineering hub outside Amsterdam. Telangana's IT minister opened the new center on October 9.

Backbase says the space will house UX, full-stack, data and test engineers, as well as Forward Deployed Engineers and Applied AI Engineers, working across product and platform development.

CEO Jouk Pleiter framed the work around AI agents that take a bank customer's request through to a governed outcome, with a record of every step. That is the kind of deployment work, built inside regulated customer environments, where FDEs tend to sit.

For FDEs, it's one more sign that the role is spreading beyond AI labs into established enterprise software vendors, and that India is becoming a real hub for these jobs, not just a back office.