One million yuan (about 134,000 euros) a year. That’s the salary that big Chinese tech companies, including ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba, are offering a very specific technical profile, as the South China Morning Post explains: Forward-Deployed Engineers or engineer assigned to the client. Or what’s the same, talk to the client to understand their problem, choose the appropriate AI tool and implement the solution.
A fact to contextualize the offer: According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, in 2025, technical professionals in the IT sector of Chinese companies of a certain size earned an average of 275,504 yuan and their entire workforce, 106,080 yuan. That is, about 4 to 10 times more.
They raffle them off. A few well-known examples: Tencent advertised on the Boss Zhipin platform for FDE for its AI division. It offers 35,000 to 65,000 yuan per month and 15 payments, ie: up to 975,000 yuan per year. ByteDance ranges from 35,000 to 70,000 yuan and offers 15 payments.
A report from Maimai (something like China’s LinkedIn) recorded a 1,523% increase in searches for that profile in the first seven months of the year compared to the same period in 2025, making this technical AI profile the one with the highest growth in practice. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has released a statement encouraging companies to create FDE teams
Why is it important?. Because models will continue to be refined and improved, but Apollo Global Management warned in a report a few days ago, one of the world’s largest investment funds and asset managers, that despite multimillion-dollar investments and optimism, AI has yet to improve returns or productivity in companies (outside the technology sector). In short: at the moment, the only people making money with AI are the big tech companies that developed it, with no clear performance for the rest.
The Gordian Knot that leads from the laboratory to the factory. MIT’s June 2025 “The GenAI Divide” report concluded that only 5% of custom enterprise AI tools make it into production, and most pilot projects have no measurable impact on the bottom line. Fortune interviewed its lead author, who highlighted the problem: learning gaps and poor integration in companies. An FDE is the profile that resolves it.
FDE courses are in the oven. In Shanghai, according to The Paper, they are even considering combining FDE training with FP qualifications and taking postgraduate courses. Tencent has already gone ahead and launched what the company calls “the industry’s first FDE certification.” The concept is clear: land AI in a practical and personalized way.
Also desirable in the west. Although we are talking about Chinese technology companies, there are those who say that this role was born at Palantir and indeed, FDE is among the most in-demand profiles. Thus, according to Financial Times data collected by Fast Company, forward-deployed engineering advertising in the US is set to increase by 800% from 2025. Now Google and OpenAI are also looking into it, and Anthropic has announced a $100 million investment to train 10,000 such engineers by the end of 2027.
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