Edge computing means running processing as close as possible to where data is produced or consumed, rather than in a centralized cloud datacenter.
The term covers two worlds. On the web, it refers to code running on points of presence spread around the globe (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, Fastly, Deno Deploy) to respond faster to the user: routing, authentication, personalization. These environments are more constrained than a regular server, often with no file system access.
In industry, IoT, defense or vehicles, it refers to computing on the machine, the sensor or a local gateway: a robot, a camera or a drone that analyzes its data on the spot. The reasons are latency, limited or missing network connectivity, transfer costs and data confidentiality.
Both uses share the same principle: move computing to the data, and accept more limited resources in return.
Why it matters when hiring
Always specify which edge you mean: a web developer deploying on Cloudflare Workers and an embedded engineer running a model on a Jetson board have almost nothing in common. For industrial edge, the good signal is experience with hardware constraints (memory, power consumption, remote updates). A vague job ad on this point attracts the wrong profiles.