FDE Jobs in India: Cursor Hires, Pay Starts at ₹3.5 LPA (1 Nov 2026)

FDE hiring in India kept a steady pace this week, but the new listings with posted pay sit at the low end of the market: ₹3.5–14 LPA for one to four years of experience. The bigger names posting India roles, including Cursor and Komodo Health, did not publish pay. On the layoff side, Microsoft’s exit offer now has a reported India deadline, and Amazon’s October cuts reached India staff.

How many FDE jobs are in India this week?

Counts depend heavily on which board you look at, so treat them as a range rather than one number.

• Indeed India returned 1,399 results for a “forward deployed engineer” search on 1 November 2026, according to the page’s own summary. Indeed matches on keywords, so this includes solutions, deployment and AI engineering roles that are not titled FDE.
• By city on Indeed India, Bengaluru showed 442 results and Mumbai 100.
• Glassdoor India, which we tracked last week, showed about 522 listings in late October (29 October Pulse). We could not get a fresh count from it today.

Bengaluru accounts for nearly a third of Indeed’s India results. These are keyword matches, not a count of FDE-titled jobs. Indeed India, 1 Nov 2026.

For context, The Anti Job Board counted 523 live FDE roles across 349 companies worldwide on 31 October, with a median advertised range of $160K–$219K for roles that post US-dollar pay. That figure is mostly US jobs and does not describe India pay.

New FDE listings in India and what they pay

Two roles with posted pay went up in the last few days, and both sit at or below the entry band in published rate cards.

Genrise.ai’s listing on JobFound, posted 29 October, wants strong Python and SQL, with LLM and agent experience as a plus. It also asks every applicant for a short note on something they built that real users depended on, and says applications without it are not reviewed. Newpage Solutions, which builds AI and data products for pharma and healthcare clients, listed its Chennai role on 31 October with Python, TypeScript, React, Spark, AWS and Azure. PinnacleU’s ₹7–10 LPA Bengaluru role, which we first noted on 27 October, is still live on Indeed India.

Every posted range this week fits inside or below Second Talent’s entry band. JobFound (Oct 2026), Indeed India (Nov 2026), Second Talent (Sep 2026).

Second Talent’s rate card, last updated 14 September, puts India FDE fixed pay at ₹6–14 LPA for 0–2 years and ₹14–28 LPA for 3–6 years. Self-reported data on Levels.fyi, updated 31 October, gives a median total pay of about ₹17.7 LPA, but from only 11 salaries.

Global AI companies posting India FDE roles

The better-known names hiring this week skipped the pay line but were specific about the work.

• Cursor is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer – India, with the role spread across Bengaluru, New Delhi and Mumbai, according to its listing on a16z’s speedrun talent network. The job is to find a customer’s real engineering bottleneck, build Cursor-powered workflows such as large refactors, migrations and PR review loops, ship a first version in days and then harden it with evals, tracing and monitoring. It asks for strong Python and TypeScript; no years or pay are given.
• Komodo Health wants a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, AI in India with 7+ years. The listing describes deploying MCP servers and agentic workflows inside customer clouds, Terraform-managed AWS, Databricks and Snowflake data, and regulated work under SOC 2 and HIPAA.
• On Indeed India’s Mumbai page, FDE-titled roles appeared from Blue Machines AI (Gen AI and voice AI), Gnani Innovations (senior FDE), Kyndryl and Boston Consulting Group (a lead forward deployed AI engineer for India). Kyndryl’s Mumbai FDE – AI listing, which asked for 3–6 years with agentic AI and GenAI work, is now closed to applications.
• Bengaluru results on Indeed included FDE roles at Lenovo, Apple (in its global sourcing and supply management solutions team) and a junior FDE role at Elfonze Technologies.

The pattern from our fresher guide holds: entry roles pay modestly and ask for proof you have shipped something, while senior roles at global firms ask for production AI plus cloud and data depth.

Layoffs and FDE hiring this week, side by side

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

• Microsoft: its voluntary exit offer, first reported last week, covers eligible staff at level 70 and below in India, the US, the UK and Canada. ThePrint, citing PTI, reports Microsoft has about 23,000 employees in India and that eligible India staff reportedly have until 1 December to decide; how many in India are eligible is unclear.
• Amazon cut under 1,000 office roles worldwide in October, mainly in its Stores division, and News Karnataka reports India staff were affected, without a number.
• Netflix (about 1,000 roles), eBay (about 1,000) and HubSpot (about 660) also announced cuts in October, per the same report; none gave India figures. HubSpot’s CEO said its cuts were not driven by AI efficiencies.
• Innodata: a follow-up to our last Pulse. Inc42 reports the termination email for about 550 India staff cited a ramp-down of a business assignment and said it was not about performance.

Where FDE demand is heading

Two services-firm moves this month are worth watching from India. On 13 October Accenture and Workday announced a joint FDE programme to put agentic AI into production inside client HR and finance teams; no headcount or locations were given. On 29 October Singapore’s NCS, part of the Singtel Group, said it will grow its forward-deployed engineers from 100 to more than 300 within two years through reskilling and hiring.

Neither announcement mentions India, but both follow the model TCS and Infosys have described for their own FDE build-outs: services firms packaging forward-deployed teams around a platform. If that spreads, more FDE openings may come from consulting and services firms, not only AI startups. The Workday tie-up in particular points to HR and finance systems as a growing niche.

What this means for you this week

1. Check the band before you apply. If a listing shows ₹3.5–10 LPA, it is an entry role whatever the title. Compare it with the benchmarks on our salary page and negotiate from the posted range.
2. Write your “something I built” note now. Genrise.ai will not read applications without one. Keep a 200-word version ready describing a system real users depended on, what broke and how you fixed it.
3. For global AI roles, show evals and production. Cursor and Komodo Health both ask for tracing, evaluation and monitoring, not just prototypes. Add one deployed project with logs and an eval set to your portfolio, and rehearse it with our interview questions guide.
4. Look beyond Bengaluru. Mumbai’s results now include Cursor, BCG, Gnani and Blue Machines AI, and Newpage is hiring in Chennai. If you are unsure which roles fit your profile, the FDE Alignment Checker maps your skills to the role.