EY just started paying first-year hires more than people who've been at the firm for five years.
In April, EY became the first Big Four firm to launch a Forward Deployed Engineer practice across the UK and Ireland, recruiting 45 to 50 senior engineers in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and Belfast. The starting salary clears £130,000. A senior tech consultant at EY with five to seven years of experience typically earns somewhere between £75,000 and £110,000 total.
The job description requires proficiency in "Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent agentic coding platforms." That tells you everything about what EY thinks is actually valuable right now.
The Forward Deployed Engineer title isn't EY's invention. Palantir created it years ago for engineers who embed directly inside a client's business and build production software rather than delivering a strategy presentation and moving on. The whole point is you don't leave until the thing works. FDE job postings on Indeed have jumped 729% year over year, from 643 in April 2025 to over 5,300 in April 2026, and EY isn't even the only consulting firm chasing it. Deloitte has its own FDE service page. Accenture and ServiceNow launched a joint FDE program focused on scaling agentic AI.
Preetham Peddanagari, EY's CTO for UK and Ireland, framed the move around a specific gap: most enterprises have proven AI works in isolated use cases, he said, but "far fewer have deployed AI consistently across their core operations." EY's own research backs that up, with 78% of UK organizations saying AI is fully or mostly implemented while 49% admit their current approach isn't ready for autonomous AI systems.
The distance between "we have AI tools" and "AI is actually doing something useful" is what consulting firms are now building entire practices to close. We've covered this pattern before, with Cloudflare sorting its staff into builders and measurers and C3.ai rebuilding without traditional engineers entirely. The consulting industry's version just comes with a £130,000 price tag and a job title borrowed from a defense contractor.
The people who originated the role aren't exactly thrilled about it. Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex Technologies and a former Palantir FDE, told MarketWatch that a lot of ex-Palantir engineers find the copycats "kind of cringe," with firms adopting the title without understanding what made the role actually work. Palantir's global head of commercial, Ted Mabrey, said the imitators are "replicating the form but not the function of the FDE."
The skepticism has some real weight. Consulting firms run on client responsiveness, fast turnarounds, and billable hours. Good engineering requires focused blocks of time, code review that doesn't get rushed, and the freedom to push back when a system isn't ready to ship. Those two cultures don't naturally coexist, and paying someone £130,000 doesn't resolve the tension by itself.
There's also the question of whether consulting firms are building these roles to stay relevant before someone else makes them irrelevant. James O'Dowd, a UK recruiter, put it bluntly: "It's going to be far easier for Anthropic to just hire the best consulting partner in some niche and deliver that service far more cheaply because they haven't got to pay all the people in the team." If AI labs start going directly to enterprise clients, the consulting firm's role as the go-between shrinks fast.
The £130,000 salary is going to get quoted in every recruiter's pitch deck for the next year, but the comp is really just the symptom. EY told its consulting workforce that someone who can ship code with AI tools is worth more on day one than half a decade of experience on the traditional track. Every professional services firm is going to face the same question over the next 12 months: does the person who makes AI work at a client site sit above or below the existing career ladder? The ones that restructure honestly around that answer will keep these engineers. The rest will just end up being an expensive training ground for the labs.
