AWS executive says forward-deployed engineers are 'unicorns' as it builds US$1 billion team
Asa Kalavade says AWS wants a customer mindset, deep software skills and agentic experience.
Forward-deployed engineers are hard to find, Asa Kalavade, vice president of forward-deployed engineering at Amazon Web Services, told Business Insider in an interview published Sunday. "These are unicorns," she said.
AWS announced in June a US$1 billion investment to create a dedicated forward-deployed engineering organization. Forrester estimates that between May and July, Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft pledged roughly US$9 billion to such ventures, according to the report.
Kalavade said AWS is looking for a product and customer mindset, deep software expertise and agentic experience. "Our initial seed is what I call the insurgents, the frontier engineers who've been there, done this before," she said.
She said AI models alone can get customers "halfway," with engineers needed to turn that into a customized solution, and that this summer's graduates were the first group that "grew up with more AI native thinking."
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