AI AND DATA ROLES

FDE vs data scientist

Quick answer

A data scientist explores and models; an FDE has to take that work to production and keep it running.

	DATA SCIENTIST	FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER
MAIN OUTPUT	Analyses and prototype models	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.

The default language of data, integrations and LLM tooling.

Automated checks that prove your code still works after a change.

Automated build, test and release pipelines.