The Morning Download: The Hottest Job in Tech Isn’t Very Glamorous

Good morning. A once-rare engineering role has taken over Silicon Valley, promising to bridge the gap between cutting-edge artificial intelligence and companies that want to deploy it. But not everyone is pumped about it, the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette reports.

Tech companies are increasingly reliant on the “forward deployed engineers,” who they say play a critical role in ensuring customers can actually use their sometimes complex AI offerings.

The nuanced customization that AI agents and other tools require has fueled the recent trendiness of the job title, which was popularized by data-analysis firm Palantir. Read the full story here.

But did we mention the food? “It means spending a lot of time on planes, sleeping in three-star hotels, somewhere in middle America, and working out of a dimly lit windowless conference room where there’s not enough charging ports,” said Barry McCardel, who worked as an FDE at Palantir for about five years before founding AI analytics platform Hex. “It’s not glamorous,” he said.

Beyond bare-bones accommodations, the job itself is also tough. Small teams with limited resources are under a time crunch to solve a problem that has never been solved before. Often, customers don’t use the projects they spend time building, McCardel added.

“The extreme pace and heightened expectations and intensity of the forward deployed motion is not for everyone,” he said.

Yet demand is soaring, because the forward deployed engineer can play a critical role in helping a tech company’s products establish product-market fit and generate revenue growth.

Job postings on Indeed grew more than 10-fold in 2025 compared with 2024. The number of public company transcripts mentioning the role jumped to 50 from eight over the same period, according to data from AlphaSense.

The only problem? Few engineers want the job, which has historically been seen as demanding, undesirable and less prestigious than product-focused engineering roles.

“In a software company, engineers usually want to be working on building the product itself versus having to support it with customers,” said Phillip Merrick, chairman and chief product officer of pgEdge, a provider of databases and tools for agentic AI.

Nonetheless the role has its intrinsic appeal, not to mention soaring compensation.

Joe Henke, who worked as a forward deployed engineer for Palantir for years, including several overseas trips, remembers it as quite a grind compared with the experience of his product counterparts. Yet Henke said that the work felt incredibly meaningful because he could see how it was making a difference in the real world.

Has a tech company dispatched forward-deployed engineers to help your company implement a project? Let us know how that worked out.

We want to know what you feel about AI. No, not what you think about AI, but what you really feel about it. Create an emoji that expresses your AI sentiment and send it to us. We’ll publish the best ones in future newsletters.

AI is rewriting the rules of work. AI is either doing all the work or creating more of it. Both things were true at once. While Silicon Valley engineers brag about the fleets of AI agents laboring away while they sleep, a new study found that most workers who adopt AI tools end up busier, not freer. And for thousands of employees, AI didn't change what their job looked like, it eliminated it.

The takeaway for leaders? AI just doesn't manage itself. Be intentional about how AI gets deployed. More below.

Silicon Valley's new status symbol isn't a job title or a funding round.  It's how many AI agents they can keep running while they sleep or party. Five seems to be the current agreed-upon upper limit before chaos ensues.

The trend has been turbocharged by tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw, and is quietly reshaping what it means to be an engineer, the Journal reports. Some say they haven't touched a line of code in months.

AI was supposed to lighten the load. It might be doing the opposite. A study of 164,000 workers by productivity-tracking firm ActivTrak found that AI frees up capacity that workers and employers immediately refill with more tasks.

"The appetite is always to do more, not to go home at noon," Dean Halonen, co-founder and chief revenue officer of software startup Steelhead Technologies, tells the Journal.

Some highlights of the study, which examined AI users’ digital activity 180 days before and after they began using such tools on the job.

• Time spent on email and messaging more than doubled among AI users
• Use of business-management tools rose 94%.
• Focused, uninterrupted work fell 9%

Another episode of job cuts linked to AI. Atlassian is cutting 10% of its workforce, roughly 1,600 employees, to reshape its skills mix for an AI-first future, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said in a Wednesday post. The restructuring, which will cost up to $236 million mostly in severance, comes as software stocks have cratered on fears that improving AI models threaten their core businesses.Shares at the business software company are down 53% this year.

A slew of AI-related layoffs in recent weeks. Block said last month it planned to slash 40% of its workforce, or more than 4,000 employees. Pinterest recently said it was laying off nearly 15% of its workforce as part of a plan to focus more of its resources on AI-related roles.

Iran expands war with cyberattack against a U.S. company. Thousands of employees at Stryker woke up on Wednesday to find their cellphones and laptops were suddenly disabled by a major cyberattack against the medical devices company. The hackers behind the digital assault said they were retaliating on behalf of Iran, the Journal's James Rundle and Dustin Volz report. Stryker said it found no ransomware and believes the attack is contained, but warned disruptions could continue indefinitely. 

Who controls the shopping experience? A federal judge granted Amazon a preliminary injunction blocking Perplexity's AI shopping agent from accessing password-protected parts of its site to shop on behalf of human customers. The ruling cuts to the heart of a broader battle: AI bots bypass ads and sponsored search results, a high-margin revenue driver for big retailers.

Other retailers have shown more willingness to work with AI companies. Last year Walmart said it had partnered with OpenAI to let shoppers buy its products directly within ChatGPT. More recently, Walmart clarified that it would use its own AI chatbot inside ChatGPT or other AI platforms for shopping.

Nvidia makes another AI infrastructure investment. The AI chip maker is investing $2 billion in AI cloud firm Nebius as part of a deal to jointly design and deploy large-scale data centers, with Nebius gaining early access to Nvidia's latest chips, WSJ reports. The deal comes as Nvidia has also been investing across the broader AI infrastructure supply chain. Nvidia last week also announced $2 billion investments each in Lumentum and Coherent to advance optical networking technology for AI infrastructure.

Robots rising. Mind Robotics, founded by Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, has raised $500 million at a $2 billion valuation from Accel and Andreessen Horowitz to build AI-powered factory robots, WSJ reports. The startup is training its robots using camera data from Rivian's own plants, where they'll also be deployed.

Escalating Iranian attacks and the U.S. government’s decision to hold off on military escorts for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz are raising the prospect of a prolonged closure that would choke off exports through the world’s most important energy-transport route. (WSJ)

President Trump—faced with rising oil prices and pushback from his MAGA base—is signaling that he wants to wind down the war he launched against Iran less than two weeks ago. But stopping the fighting carries big risks, even if Iran lets him. (WSJ)

In a rapid reversal that left U.S. allies stunned, the Trump administration shifted from opposing the largest-ever intervention in oil markets to cajoling allies into moving forward with the maneuver in a matter of hours. (WSJ)

McDonald’s wants to out-value its own value menu. Starting in April, the world’s biggest burger chain plans to launch new deals and discounts to keep the chain ahead of competitors in the battle for fast-food dollars. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.