Voice AI is driving a new wave of FDE hiring in India, with Hunar.AI and Navana.ai building out teams

A BusinessLine report published on November 13 says voice AI is one of the clearest places where the gap between a demo and a working product shows up, and that this is fuelling demand for forward deployed engineers in India. It cites Indeed data showing global FDE postings up 729% year on year between April 2025 and April 2026, and Indian postings up 1,807% year on year in June 2026.

Hunar.AI co-founder and CEO Krishna Khandelwal said the company onboarded five FDEs in the last 30 days and expects the team to reach at least 20 over the next year. He said Hunar.AI mostly hires developers with one to two years of experience who can design solutions and work with customers. Navana.ai CEO Raoul Nanavati said every new enterprise account needs dedicated FDE support, that the company is building internal tooling so each FDE can handle more agents and customers, and that owning its own speech models lets engineers fix accuracy problems at the model level. He called FDEs one of the hardest roles to hire, because candidates need production coding, LLM and speech skills plus the ability to work with banking and financial-services leaders.

Raghav Gupta, founder of FDE Academy, argued in the piece that the role suits seasoned engineers rather than beginners, naming backend, full-stack, solutions and applied ML engineers as well placed, with APIs, cloud, LLMs, RAG and enterprise integrations as useful experience.

Why it matters: voice deployments add latency, multilingual and network constraints on top of usual integration work, so voice AI companies are emerging as a distinct FDE employer group. The two startups also show different hiring bars, from early-career developers trained in house to experienced engineers with domain knowledge.