FDE Jobs in India: Keyrus Posts ₹45–70 LPA, Bengaluru Holds 34% (5 Nov 2026)

FDE hiring in India edged up again this week. Glassdoor India’s FDE listings reached 564, and the standout new role is a Keyrus Forward Deployed Engineer job for Pune or Bengaluru with posted pay of ₹45–70 LPA. A new talent report also gives the clearest city map yet of where India’s FDEs work: about a third are in Bengaluru.

This Pulse follows Tuesday’s FDE Jobs in India: DevRev Posts ₹28–36 LPA, Gurugram Heats Up. It covers what has changed since then: the new listings, the talent map, and the week’s layoff news.

FDE job listings in India: small rise on Glassdoor, a dip on career pages

The two Glassdoor India counts we track both moved up again in early November:

• The broad forward deployed engineer search shows 564 listings, up from 557 on Tuesday.
• The exact Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) title search shows 125, up from 119.

The career-page view is softer. Neurapath, which tracks employers’ own careers sites, lists 116 open roles from 68 companies, with 84 carrying an FDE title and only 1 new this week. That is down from 126 roles across 73 companies in late October. Taken together, job boards are still adding FDE-titled posts slowly, but few new employers are entering the market this week. Naukri and LinkedIn India totals are still not publicly reported in pages we could access.

New FDE roles in India this week, with posted pay

Three new listings stand out, and two of them show pay.

Keyrus: ₹45–70 LPA for Pune or Bengaluru

Keyrus, the data and AI consultancy, posted a Forward Deployed Engineer role on 3 November 2026, according to JobFound. The listing states compensation of ₹45–70 LPA, which is the highest posted pay we have seen for an India FDE role since Cartesia’s ₹70–90 LPA founding role in October.

The job is to take AI use cases from discovery to production with clients, then own the rollout and measure outcomes, including evaluation, guardrails and AI cost. One oddity: the listing is tagged “Fresher”, yet every requirement assumes real production experience. Treat it as a mid-to-senior role, and expect the GMT shift to be part of the trade.

Zorba AI: ₹10–25 LPA for 2+ years in Bengaluru

Zorba AI posted a Forward Deployed Engineer – AI Agents role in Bengaluru on the same day, with a ₹10–25 LPA band and 2+ years in product backend or AI engineering. The work is building and running LLM agents, including voice agents, in production: prompts, RAG pipelines, evaluation frameworks and go-lives alongside customers. Strong Python and SQL are required; Databricks and MongoDB are a bonus.

Keyrus’s floor is above DevRev’s ceiling. Employer-posted pay via JobFound, 1–3 Nov 2026.

Put next to DevRev’s ₹28–36 LPA Mumbai role from 1 November, the three listings span ₹10 LPA to ₹70 LPA. Posted FDE pay in India still depends far more on the employer and the client geography than on the title.

Supervity and Notion: India roles without posted pay

• Supervity lists a Forward Deployed AI Engineer role in Mumbai, on-site. It mixes sales engineering with building: discovery with senior client leaders, then multi-agent workflows wired into ERPs such as SAP or Coupa. It asks for Python or TypeScript, Google Cloud (Vertex AI, Cloud Run) and Docker. No pay or years are stated.
• Notion is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer, India focused on customer migrations, according to its Ashby listing. Neurapath lists the role as Hyderabad or remote with 3+ years, which we could not confirm on Notion’s own page.

Global lab demand still sits outside India. FDE Jobs List shows 383 FDE listings worldwide, and the newest page is led by Anthropic, Palantir, Together AI, Scale AI and Snorkel AI roles in the US, Europe, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, none in India.

Where India’s FDE talent works: the city map

GoodReturns, with inputs from PTI, reported on 3 November on FDE Academy’s report The Forward Deployed Engineer Talent Landscape in India. It is the first city-by-city split of the FDE talent pool we have seen:

• Bengaluru holds 34% of India’s FDE talent.
• Hyderabad has 14%, Delhi NCR 13%, Pune 12% and Mumbai 11%.
• Chennai and other cities are at 8% each.

Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi NCR together hold 61% of FDE talent. FDE Academy report via GoodReturns/PTI, Nov 2026.

The report also says about 70% of India’s FDEs have eight years of experience or less, and puts Big Tech as the largest employer type at 38%, with AI-first startups at 14%. Its other employer-type shares add up to more than 100%, so read that split as rough.

What it means: this is a map of where FDEs work, not where jobs are open. But it lines up with the listings. Keyrus is hiring in Pune and Bengaluru, and Notion’s role is listed for Hyderabad. If you are outside Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune are the realistic second markets. See our Hyderabad and Pune city guides for employers there.

Layoffs and FDE hiring this week, side by side

These are listed next to FDE hiring for context. No source links any of these cuts to forward deployed engineer roles.

• Canva: CEO Melanie Perkins announced 1,271 job cuts, about 22% of staff, on 4 November, TechCrunch and The Week report. She said growth had “slowed for the first time in a decade”. The Week says staff will be moved to central hubs such as Sydney. Neither report says how many India staff are affected.
• Squarespace and SUSE: WorkforceSignal’s tracker lists November cuts of 300 people (19%) at Squarespace and 10% of staff at SUSE. It gives no India detail for either.
• Qualcomm: a follow-up from Tuesday. DQ India says notifications are expected this month, but there is no confirmed information that India staff are affected.

What this means for you this week

1. Use Keyrus’s band as a ceiling check, not a norm. ₹45–70 LPA comes with GMT hours and enterprise client work. Compare it with the wider range on our salary page before you anchor a negotiation.
2. If you have 2–4 years, target agent-building roles. Zorba AI’s listing is a good template: Python, SQL, RAG and evaluation frameworks. Our FDE skills guide maps those skills to a learning plan.
3. Prepare an evals and cost story. Keyrus and Zorba both mention evaluation, and Keyrus names AI cost measurement. Have one example of how you measured an LLM feature’s accuracy and spend.
4. Widen beyond Bengaluru. With two-thirds of FDE talent outside Bengaluru, set job alerts for Hyderabad, Pune and Mumbai, and check your gaps with the FDE Alignment Checker.