Forward deployed engineer (FDE) postings in the US grew from about 200 in 2024 to about 1,200 in 2025, then passed 5,200 in the first seven months of 2026, according to Lightcast (September 2026). The role rewards AI and software depth, delivery skill and the ability to work directly with customers. LinkedIn’s 2026 Jobs on the Rise report ranks AI Engineer as the fastest-growing US job title, with postings up 143% year over year. ISC2 puts the global cybersecurity workforce gap at 4.8 million in 2026.
Hiring for these roles is slow. Ashby’s 2026 benchmarks show technical roles take a median of 75 days to fill, and its startup hiring data puts the cost at 21 to 29 interviewer hours per technical hire.
Napplied, an AI-native hiring platform, was built to close that gap for India and US teams hiring in AI, cybersecurity, AI safety and AI governance.
“The best FDE or security engineer rarely looks best on paper,” said Md Mahabub Alam, founder of Napplied. “You only find them by seeing how they think, then proving why they rank where they do. Our mission is simple: put the right frontier talent in front of the right team, faster, with evidence behind every call.”
Why Napplied is built differently
- Depth over keywords. Napplied’s structured AI interviewer, Morpheus, asks every candidate for a role questions tied to the same criteria. Hiring managers compare real depth, not well-written resumes.
- Evidence, not a bare score. Every ranking leaves a reviewable trail of what was asked, what was answered and what it was judged against. That matters as AI hiring faces more scrutiny, and Gartner finds only 26% of applicants trust AI to evaluate them fairly but Napplied careful enough to trace in the persona intelligence for the job seeker i.e. the futue of resume
- One pipeline, less waiting. Search, screening, interviews and ranking run as a single workflow inside the ATS a team already uses, with no separate tools and no re-screening between stages. Candidate profiles carry over to related roles, so a strong AI engineer found for one team is already in view for the next.
- Signals for the frontier. Napplied is tuned to the skills that set apart candidates in AI and security roles, the kind a keyword search misses.
About Napplied
Napplied is a bootstrapped, founder-led AI-native hiring platform, selected for the AltaLab Fall 2026 cohort and LvlUp Ventures’ Power of the Pitch, and ranked #12 among India’s top agentic AI startups on F6S. Learn more at napplied.com or write to welcome@napplied.com.
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