The Skills Companies Look For When Hiring FDEs

Aishwarya Srinivasan is the co-founder of The Gen Academy and one of the world's most recognized AI educators, with a community of over 1.2 million AI professionals across social platforms. Previously, she led AI Developer Relations at Fireworks AI and spent over a decade building AI products and ecosystems at Google, Microsoft, and IBM. She holds a Master's in Data Science from Columbia University.

Arvind Narayanamurthy is the Co-founder of The Gen Academy, Previously AI Solutions Architect at Ema, and Founder of Eikos Health. He has built and deployed enterprise AI systems across Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, and high-growth startups, leading initiatives that translated machine learning into measurable business impact. Arvind holds a Master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

Phani Kolanuvada is a Senior Director of Forward Deployed Engineering at Salesforce and was one of the founding members of its FDE organization. He helped build the function during the GenAI transformation, growing it from a handful of engineers to several hundred FDEs working directly with customers to deploy enterprise AI at scale. He brings a firsthand perspective on what FDEs ship, how the role differs from software engineering, professional services, and solution architecture, and what companies look for when hiring FDE talent.