Amazon announced Tuesday it is launching a new division within its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit, one that will station so-called forward-deployed engineers directly at customer sites to help businesses integrate artificial intelligence tools more quickly and effectively.
The tech giant is putting up an initial $1 billion to get the initiative off the ground. According to Francessca Vasquez, AWS vice president of frontier AI engineering and services, the plan calls for sending groups of five to six engineers — referred to as pods — to work alongside customers for 45-day stretches at a time.
“We have a ton of demand for customers who are asking for our help to really drive agentic AI patterns in their workflows,” Vasquez said in an interview ahead of the official announcement. Forward-deployed engineers are described as adaptable professionals who work side-by-side with clients, handle internal organizational dynamics, and write production-level code to help AI systems deliver real-world results.
Amazon is entering a space where competitors have already established a foothold. Palantir Technologies has operated a similar forward-deployed engineering unit for more than ten years, and companies like Salesforce, Anthropic, and Google Cloud have their own comparable offerings.
Despite widespread job cuts across the technology sector driven by AI expansion, forward-deployed engineering has emerged as a growth area. Box CEO Aaron Levie wrote in a LinkedIn post this past May that forward-deployed engineers are “about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech.” A LinkedIn report released earlier this year found that demand for these roles grew 42 times over between 2023 and 2025.
AWS indicated the new division would eventually employ “thousands” of workers, though the company did not provide exact figures. Amazon plans to bring in outside hires as well as reassign existing employees to fill positions. The company has eliminated more than 30,000 corporate jobs since October.
The announcement came during a two-day customer conference in Washington, where Amazon is also expected to unveil additional products and services related to government cloud computing.
Vasquez said the division’s performance will be judged by how fast customers can build new products or develop new capabilities with the assistance of Amazon’s engineers. “We want to make sure that these customers get value in faster durations than what they’ve traditionally seen in project-based activity,” she said.
Amazon confirmed that the National Basketball Association and Ricoh, an electronics company, are among the first businesses participating in the new program.
