Yozm IT and a Korean FDE community launch a survey of what forward deployed engineers in Korea actually do

Korean tech magazine Yozm IT (run by Wishket) has opened the "국내 FDE 현황 조사 2026" (Korea FDE Status Survey 2026) together with 비욘드디플로이가, a Korean community of FDE and AX (AI transformation) engineers. Yozm IT says that while preparing interviews with working FDEs, it got a different answer every time it asked what the job actually involves.

The survey counts people by the work they do, not their title: anyone who is now taking customers' business problems, solving them with AI and getting the result into real operations, or has done so in the past year, can take part, whether they are called an FDE, AX engineer or solutions engineer, and including people whose "customers" are internal teams. It asks four questions: where respondents came from, where and on what contract terms they work, how they work (who defines the problem, where the work they build in the field ends up, what happens after a project ends), and whether they plan to stay in the role.

Responses will be split by employer and contract type to show how different jobs sit under the same FDE label. That speaks to the open question of whether FDE is a genuinely new role or existing development work under a new name. The survey runs from October 15 to 31 and takes about 5-7 minutes. Responses are anonymous, and the report is due in November.