HCLTech is building a central FDE Academy with OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google and Nvidia tracks
On its Q2 FY27 earnings call, HCLTech said it is scaling a forward deployed engineer capability and setting up an enterprise-wide FDE Academy, as advanced AI revenue rose 78% year on year to $219 million.
HCLTech used its Q2 FY27 results on October 12 to describe forward deployed engineers as part of its AI talent strategy. CEO C. Vijayakumar said the company is scaling an FDE capability that combines AI engineering with customer discovery, solution architecture and rapid prototyping, with the aim of taking AI use cases all the way to production.
To build that pool, HCLTech is setting up a centralized FDE Academy with training tracks aligned to OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google and Nvidia. It is also working with Microsoft on a frontier transformation engineer program and with MIT on applied research into the safety of agentic systems. Asked about its OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships, Vijayakumar said HCLTech's value there lies largely in "the FDE motion" and the services around it.
The numbers behind the push: advanced AI revenue reached $219 million in the quarter, up 78% year on year, and headcount grew by 6,450 to about 230,000. The company onboarded 6,136 freshers in the quarter and expects to hire roughly 10,000 to 11,000 in FY27.
Why it matters for FDEs: HCLTech joins TCS and Infosys among the large Indian IT services firms building FDE teams at scale. Vendor-specific academy tracks suggest that services firms will hire and train FDEs around particular model platforms, so hands-on experience with OpenAI, Anthropic or the major clouds is likely to count in these interviews.
Source: www.dqindia.com