EPAM's chief people officer calls the forward deployed engineer the top corporate hire of 2026

The Philadelphia Inquirer asked five Philadelphia-area business leaders how AI is changing their companies, and the forward deployed engineer came up as the role they are hiring for. Larry Solomon, chief people officer at IT services firm EPAM Systems (about 65,000 workers), said the top corporate-hiring position as of 2026 is the FDE who understands AI agents, knows the business deeply, and has solid change-management and relationship skills.

Solomon argued that adjusting to AI goes beyond learning products: an FDE has to work their way around an organization and its bureaucracy and be understood at different levels to get agents and systems implemented, which often takes experience with integrating systems and with failures. Mike Gadsby, cofounder of design and engineering consultancy O3 World, said that when it hires engineers and FDEs it looks for problem solvers who can talk to people and work out both where problems come from and how people feel about them.

For FDE candidates, the piece is a reminder that large services firms now see the role as a business-facing hire, not only a technical one: interviews are likely to probe stakeholder handling and change management as much as coding.