AI AND DATA ROLES

FDE vs data engineer

Quick answer

A data engineer moves and models data; an FDE moves it too, then builds retrieval and agents on top of it for the customer.

	DATA ENGINEER	FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER
MAIN OUTPUT	Pipelines and warehouses	A working deployment inside one customer's systems
CLIENT TIME	Lower than an FDE	High: discovery, demos and handover every week
WRITES PRODUCTION CODE	Yes	Yes
PAY	See FDE salary in India for bands by experience and city.

Retrieval-augmented generation: answer from the customer's own documents.

Systems where a model chooses tools and steps toward a goal.

Working with the people who sponsor, use and block a deployment.