Hi Reader,

Yudi here,

There is a job in tech right now that pays around $300,000.

And most people in this space are either not aware of it or not taking it seriously.

Here is the part that might sting a little if you are currently chasing a traditional software engineering role.

That door is not just getting harder to walk through. It is quietly splitting into two halves.

• One half is shrinking because AI is doing the entry-level coding work faster and cheaper than any new grad ever could.
• The other half is exploding, and it barely even existed two years ago.

I am seeing this in real time inside my Job Hunt Accelerator program, where students are telling me firsthand how the entry-level coding market feels.

I also read through three full reports for my recent video on this: hiring data, salary studies, and what is actually working for people who are landing these roles right now.

The role is called Forward Deployed Engineer.

Let me explain it the way I actually think about it.

Imagine you are building a house. The salesperson sells you the dream. The architect draws the blueprint. The normal engineer builds the materials and tools. Then the forward deployed engineer shows up on your actual messy construction site, with your half-finished walls and your weird existing wires, and figures out how to put everything together so the house actually gets finished and works the way you want.

That is a fundamentally different job than writing clean code in isolation.

A consultant gives you a slide deck and leaves. A forward deployed engineer ships working code, deploys it inside your real business systems, and stays until it actually produces a measurable outcome. Revenue saved. Cost cut. Process automated. They own the whole thing.

Why This Role Exploded

There is a study from MIT that I keep coming back to.

It looked at 300 real company AI projects. 95% of them produced almost no real business impact. Not because the AI was bad. The models worked fine.

The problem was everything else. Messy legacy data. Old internal systems. Security restrictions. Political friction inside companies trying to get cross-team access. That ugly 80% of implementation work that demos never show you.

That gap is exactly what the forward deployed engineer was built to fill.

One job board alone had 200 open roles for this position across hundreds of companies when I last checked. The role grew 800% in a single year. Google posted it globally in their first week, covering India, Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, and Canada simultaneously.

And here is the data point that really caught my attention: New York just overtook San Francisco as the number one city for these jobs.

These are companies that hire globally and sponsor visas. And this role is growing while most other entry-level tech roles are shrinking.

This Is Not a Credential-First Role

This is the part I want you to hear if you have been holding back because of your GPA, your university name, or your visa situation.

Companies are not screening for where you studied. They are screening for one thing: can you walk into chaos, understand the business problem, understand the AI system they want to implement, put the two together, and ship something that actually works?

That is a portfolio question, not a credential question.

The loop this job runs on is the same everywhere: scope, build, deploy, and prove. You find the real bottleneck in a messy business, you build an AI-powered solution for it, you deploy it inside their actual systems, and you stay until the business results are there. Not just code pushed. Actual outcome delivered.

How to Actually Get This Role Without a Track Record

Here is the part most people skip straight to and then wonder why it is not working.

Stop building another chatbot or LLM demo. Everyone is building those. What actually gets you hired is a single real project that mirrors the full forward deployed loop.

Pick an industry that interests you: healthcare, fintech, legal, content, supply chain, sales.

Find a genuinely messy problem in that space. Something with real data, real edge cases, and real friction. Scope the one bottleneck worth solving. Build an AI agent that solves exactly that one thing. Connect it to real infrastructure, real APIs, real authentication. Handle the ugly edge cases. Then deploy it somewhere people can actually see it working.

Because the companies paying $300,000 for this role are not paying for clean code. They are paying for judgment, customer empathy, and the ability to turn chaos into outcomes.

The Part Most People Get Wrong After They Build the Portfolio

You could have every piece of this in place and still not get an interview call.

Because having the skills and being able to communicate them in a way that gets you in the room are two completely different things.

Your resume, your LinkedIn positioning, your outreach strategy, how you talk about your projects in an interview, how you network before roles are even posted, all of that matters just as much as the work you built.

That is the part I teach inside the Job Hunt Accelerator.

he program is built specifically for people in STEM who are in the US, either currently studying or recently graduated, who want to land internships, co-ops, and full-time roles without relying on luck or mass-applying into silence.

If you are planning to come to the US in Fall 2026 or you are already here and job hunting, this is the right time to be inside that program.

You get lifetime access, a live WhatsApp community, and the ability to ask questions anytime.

The earlier you start building your strategy, the better your positioning when the moment actually matters. Check it out here.​

The market is moving fast on this one. The people who understand it early are the ones who end up on the right side of the split.

Talk soon,
Yudi