FDE Jobs

OpenAI didn't just staff FDEs in-house — it spun up a whole subsidiary for the job. DeployCo is the OpenAI Deployment Company, funded with outside investors on the thesis that deployment, not model capability, is now the binding constraint on enterprise AI value. This founding FDE seat ($170K–$400K + equity, player-coach track) is a bet that FDE-as-a-business scales — distinct from OpenAI's own enterprise FDE role, and one of the clearest signals yet that the frontier labs see deployment as a company, not a function.

The purest FDE-DNA startup on the board: its co-founders created and led Forward Deployed AI Engineering at Palantir — and started it in Palantir's London office. Now Sequoia-backed on a $30M Series A, they're selling that motion as a product. If you want the Palantir FDE playbook from the people who wrote it, this is the shortest path.

The purest bet yet that 'FDE' is a business model, not just a role: Cars24 spun out Deployment Inc — India's first dedicated forward-deployed AI firm — with $5M, an OpenAI Select Partner badge, and a plan to hire ~50 engineers (mostly FDEs) in a single month. Led by a Cars24 exec and an ex-xAI backend engineer, embedding pods inside India's largest enterprises. Founding-team leverage, in Gurugram, not SF.

$310K–$500K at a nonprofit is the plot twist of the week — Jacob Steinhardt and Sarah Schwettmann's eval lab pays frontier-lab money for an FDE whose 'customers' are the EU AI Office and civil-society partners, with privileged-access evaluation exercises run inside frontier labs. Deployment work where the deployment target is AI oversight itself.

The rare FDE seat where the deliverable isn't inference but training itself — embed with AI labs and enterprises to design their post-training runs, RL environments, and eval harnesses on Prime Intellect's Lab stack. Backed by Founders Fund with Andrej Karpathy angel'd in; the $150K floor-to-$300K ceiling spread means they'll level you on research chops, not tenure.

Sandstone is blunt that this is a post-sales seat that must clear the same technical bar as core engineering — a $110K band width for a role explicitly described as "not a sales role" but which owns retention and expansion. That's the legal-AI category quietly admitting the FDE is really a commercially-accountable engineer, and paying founding-title money to avoid saying so out loud.

A $330K top-of-band leadership seat is the loudest signal yet that FDE has graduated from IC hustle to org-building. BetterUp — a coaching unicorn, not an AI-native lab — is standing up a net-new forward-deployed function, which tells you the motion has spread well past Palantir's orbit. If you can run a manager-of-managers FDE org, this is one of the best-paid such jobs on the board.

Basis just raised $100M at a >$1B valuation to put AI agents inside the largest accounting firms — and it's badging its deployment engineers as 'Member of Technical Staff,' not FDE, a tell that the frontier-lab title convention is bleeding into vertical AI. On-site NYC, agent-heavy, and pointed at one of the least glamorous but highest-ROI back offices in the enterprise.

The company selling an autonomous software engineer (Devin) runs a human 'Deployed Engineer' fleet a dozen postings deep — SF/NYC/Austin plus ANZ, Tokyo, Singapore, London, Brazil, South Korea, and a Federal DC seat. They dropped the 'Forward,' but it's the same role, and the tell is unmissable: when the autonomous-coding leader needs this many people to land the product, the last mile is still very much human.

Four FDE postings — including two Regional Director seats in SF and London — from a company being acquired by SpaceX at $60B. Cursor is building a global FDE org mid-acquisition; nobody does that for a side project.

Three ex-OpenAI researchers raised $80M from Benchmark and Sequoia to sell the FDE motion itself — embedding is the product, not the support function. In $1.3B-valuation talks within months of launch.

Anthropic's FDE org is brand new and scaling fast — early FDEs here will define the playbook.

Ground floor of OpenAI's billion-dollar FDE venture announced in May — the highest-leverage deployment seat in the industry.

The company that invented the role — 51 open FDE positions, the largest FDE hiring pipeline anywhere.

Anthropic is planting FDEs in Germany — a Munich req that wants a native German speaker with 8+ years customer-facing engineering, framed explicitly as "one of our founding FDEs" for the region. The DACH enterprise market (finance, pharma, industrials) is where European AI budgets actually sit, and staffing a local-language FDE there is a sharper signal of Anthropic’s enterprise intent than another SF posting. Comp isn’t published on the EU req, unlike the US bands.

Databricks already runs a broad commercial FDE org; now it's carving out a clearance-gated U.S. Federal AI-FDE track ($200K–$300K, employer-provided) requiring US citizenship and eligibility for a Secret clearance. The federal FDE land-grab — AWS, Cognition, Scale, and now Databricks — is where the least salary-transparent but highest-margin deployment work is quietly concentrating.

AWS is no longer piloting FDEs — it has stood up a named 'AWS Forward Deployed Engineering' org deep enough to post IC, Senior, Manager and Senior-Manager reqs, plus a dedicated US-Government vertical gated behind TS/SCI-with-poly. When the largest cloud vendor builds a management layer for Forward Deployed Engineers, the function has crossed from experiment to permanent org chart.

Doppel is one of the first a16z/Bessemer-backed cybersecurity names to stand up a real product-building FDE org — proof the model has jumped past AI labs and data platforms into security. The Series C 'social engineering defense' company scans 150B+ entities a day and wants FDEs fluent in OAuth/SAML/SCIM and SIEM/SOAR wiring, not just LLM glue — a reminder that the highest-leverage FDE seats increasingly sit where enterprise identity plumbing meets agentic AI. Two reqs live (SF + remote US), plus an NYC lead track.

A rare cleared FDE seat that isn't at Palantir — you build on top of Foundry, AIP and Maven Smart System as the prime's integration muscle, inside classification constraints, not around them. The TS/SCI + US-citizenship gate is exactly why base opens at $220K–$280K: the clearance is scarcer than the React/Node stack. NEA/a16z/Accel-backed govtech ($35M raised) now claiming 55M residents across 50+ agencies and pushing hard into federal.

Rare FDE seat where the deployment site is a military installation and the product is a mobile carrier's own network core — Cape (privacy-first carrier, Series C closed March 2026) wants an FDE to embed with federal customers, write production glue against live cellular infrastructure, and turn pilots into programs of record. The $175K–$235K band is honest for a role that also demands a TS clearance and a flag-officer-to-git-ticket communication range; it's Anduril/Palantir deployment work without the household name.

An FDE role that's really a wedge into architecture, engineering & construction — Augrade (a ~32-person team training foundation models that turn 2D blueprints into code-compliant BIM models, cost analysis and docs) wants an FDE who can sit with design firms and productize the messy last mile. $160K–$200K is a real, posted band (no coy 'competitive'), and the domain — BIM, building codes, construction workflows — is about as far from the SaaS-chatbot FDE cliché as this title gets.

The 'founding FDE' title finally lands at a proposal-writing AI shop — AutogenAI (generative AI for bids and grant/proposal writing) is standing up its US forward-deployed function from scratch, and the fine print is the tell: US citizenship, background check, and a spot on the federal on-call rota alongside DevSecOps. It's a $180K–$200K bet that the FDE model travels into the unglamorous-but-sticky world of government procurement, not just frontier-lab demos.

FDE has officially escaped the AI-native bubble: Tailscale — a WireGuard-based networking company, not an LLM shop — just opened its first FDE seat inside Customer Success. Note the comp tell: $150K–$250K OTE (base + variable tied to sales targets), roughly half the frontier-lab TC and structured like a quota role, a reminder that 'FDE' spans everything from $550K agent-builders to networking CSEs with a fancier title.

The interesting signal isn't the role, it's the org chart: DeepJudge — a Zurich legal-AI scale-up founded by ex-Google search engineers with ETH PhDs — has stood up a whole 'Deployment Engineering' function (FDE, Pre-Sales, Production, SRE, Solution Architect) rather than one lonely FDE. You'd deploy enterprise search across on-prem and cloud for firms like Freshfields and Holland & Knight, wrangling document-management systems and hundred-million-doc datasets. A rare on-site, non-US frontier seat.

A ~$700M-revenue public company spinning up an FDE bench is its own signal — Asana is staffing Forward Deployed Engineers specifically to land 'Command,' its new agentic offering, rather than leaving deployment to Solutions or CS. Note the comp: $248K–$282K base in NYC (base, not OTE) lands above most startup TC and undercuts only the frontier labs — a reminder that the incumbents are now competing for the same FDE talent on cash.

Hardware, not chatbots: Hadrian builds autonomous factories for aerospace and defense, and its FDE embeds on enterprise programs to configure Opus (its factory-autonomy platform), write edge software, and run discovery-to-deployment with no intermediary layer. The $120K–$250K band is unusually wide — it's really two jobs (junior configurator vs. senior program owner) under one title — and one of the few FDE seats where 'production' means physical parts coming off a line.

One of the rare FDE reqs explicitly open to new grads — Casca (YC, 'AGI for banking') will take a strong new grad into a $100K–$200K FDE seat, a band that itself spans the entire early-career-to-senior spectrum. The work is embedding with banks to deploy an AI-native loan-origination system (agent 'Sarah' runs applicant comms), so you're shipping regulated fintech against 30-year-old legacy cores, not another support bot.

The title has fully crossed into Big-3 strategy consulting: BCG X (BCG's tech-build arm) ran a global Forward Deployed AI Engineer hiring wave across ~8 geos this summer — US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Sweden, India — and by mid-August every one of those had closed except this Dubai seat. That it's the Gulf req still open is its own signal: BCG is planting FDE capacity where sovereign-AI and government transformation budgets are, not just SF and London.

The clearest sign yet that FDE is decoupling from the SWE pedigree: Denari's first FDE hire explicitly waives formal software-engineering experience and instead wants a "resourceful builder" who directs agentic tools like Claude Code. Contrarian on geo too — Madison, WI, hybrid 3 days, not another SF chatbot shop. The kicker is a captive sister firm (Lucida Tax + Accounting) that dogfoods every deploy, so you hear how a solution landed within hours. Reports to the CEO.

A rare London FDE pointed at the physical world — aerospace, healthcare, energy — not another support chatbot. The cap table is the tell: a 14x-oversubscribed $4.5M seed backed by Coinbase, Reddit, Klarna, and Spotify, i.e. consumer-tech money betting on industrial workflow software. Wants a product engineer (TypeScript/React + Python, LLM integration) who ships to prod day one and runs the customer call themselves, not a solutions-consultant. On-site with visa sponsorship and relocation covered.

While the frontier labs staff FDEs to babysit LLMs, Kognitos is betting the real deployment bottleneck is the boring back office — AP, finance, and IT workflows nobody documented. Its "English as Code" neurosymbolic engine claims to kill hallucinations with deterministic logic, but every customer's tribal knowledge still has to be encoded by hand — that's the FDE's job. PepsiCo and Wipro logos, remote US, mid-level bar (3+ yrs), ~25% travel.

Plain's first FDE — when an API-first support-tooling startup hires a deployment engineer, it's the tell that its customers are now big enough to need custom integration work, not just a signup flow. $180–250K + equity to embed with SF customers.

A $170–300K band is striking for a $7M seed-stage shop — August (NEA-backed legal AI for midsize + AmLaw-150 firms) is paying near-frontier money to put an FDE onsite with law firms, betting that white-glove deployment, not model quality, wins legal AI. All-onsite NYC, no remote hedge.

One of the leanest AI companies anywhere — under 100 people at roughly $500K ARR per employee, serving 600M+ monthly inference calls. A London FDE seat at that revenue density means unusual ownership per head; £150K OTE plus meaningful equity at Series-C stage.

The State Space Models lab opens a Bangalore FDE seat — the same real-time voice-AI deployment role it runs in SF and London, now planted in India's enterprise market. A second Cartesia geo on the board and one of the few founding-era FDE roles anchored in Bengaluru.

The GRC SaaS leader — 1M+ users, 700K board members — is building its FDE function from zero to 20–25 people, and the first hires define how agents embed inside global banks' audit, risk and compliance workflows. Explicitly 'not a support or consultancy role': you own agents from failing trace to Board-trusted production. The NYC sibling posting lists $130K–$170K.

The enterprise low-code leader (1,700 staff; Toyota, Heineken, Bosch, KeyBank as customers) opens a Principal-tier FDE seat to drive its agentic transformation — a role that owns executive relationships and scopes what to build, not just how. Confirmation the FDE title has fully crossed into established platform vendors; the US sibling req posts a $153K–$186.3K base.

The management-track seat at India's first pure-play FDE firm — lead pods across concurrent enterprise deployments while staying hands-on. A founding-manager role at a $5M Cars24-backed, OpenAI-partnered venture that's stampeding to ~50 hires this month: you build the org that defines what an Indian FDE team even looks like.

CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV) is embedding an FDE inside customers' AI teams to ship agents on the W&B Weave toolkit — a $182K–$242K base plus equity is a rare public-company FDE band, and the board's first Weave-observability seat since the Weights & Biases acquisition.

Venture-backed defense-tech Picogrid wants an FDE working shoulder-to-shoulder with military customers on TAK/Maven/Lattice and multi-sensor fusion — Secret/TS clearance preferred, $120K–$200K base + significant options. A Fort Bragg seat is about as literally forward-deployed as the title gets.

Sequoia-backed Flow (Collison/Helgason/Parrish angels) is hiring one of its first FDEs to take a systems-engineering tool into space, defense and fusion teams — OTE $165K–$230K + equity, and one of the few FDE seats that rewards a hardware/MBSE background over pure software.

Series-C PhysicsX (London HQ) takes its AI-for-physics platform into aerospace, defense, semis and automotive customers — FDSEs travel to customer sites 3–4 weeks a quarter across four continents. $180K–$250K base + equity, and a rare FDE seat that rewards deep simulation/ML over SaaS integration.

YC-backed Luminai automates org-wide long-form workflows for healthcare, finance and telecom — and is hiring an FDE Team Lead at $190K–$270K, a management-track FDE role that's still uncommon on the board. Field-driven product direction with real P&L-adjacent leverage.

Series-B Adonis ($31M) runs an AI orchestration platform for healthcare payments — its Senior FDE leads on-site discovery at major health systems and writes production code against Epic and Athena EHRs. $190K–$210K + equity for an FDE that lives inside hospital revenue-cycle guts.

An 'internal' FDE: Upside's customer is its own GTM org, not an outside account — you own the platform its merchant-marketing teams run on. $214–245K employer-provided, and proof the FDE title is migrating out of AI startups into profitable retail-media marketplaces.

Amplitude (4,700 customers, NYSE-listed) is standing up a Customer-FDE org that submits PRs into the core product codebase, not a solutions-eng desk — the FDE model reaching mature public SaaS. Three levels open at once (II / Senior / Staff).

$85M-funded, third-time founders put an FDE on-site in Chicago to deploy their new AI-pentest product into regulated, on-prem enterprise environments — a rare Heartland FDE seat and the board's cybersecurity-vertical entry point.

Blitzy deploys thousands of parallel AI agents to compress months of engineering into days; a $160K–$185K FDE is the mid-band seat that embeds with enterprises actually adopting autonomous code generation — the delivery arm of the agentic-dev thesis.

Fintech-for-credit-unions hires a remote, high-ownership FDE — explicitly 'not a support or implementation role' — to build the technical foundation for new AI lending products. Equity-heavy, ship-fast, shape-the-product framing on a full-remote seat.

Salesforce is standing up Agentforce FDE seats in Hyderabad and Bangalore — the FDE title going offshore at platform scale. With Bengaluru now ~45% of India's FDE job descriptions, the delivery-hub playbook has reached the CRM giant's flagship AI product.

AR-automation fintech puts FDEs in both NYC and SF at $150K–$240K + equity to embed with finance teams at industrials and Fortune-10 brands — collections is an unsexy but land-and-expand FDE wedge.

Women-led finance-data platform (founders ex-WeWork/WaPo data leaders) hiring an FDE for Finance Solutions in NYC — reconciliation and clean reporting without ripping out the ERP, a classic embed-and-automate FDE beachhead.

YC agent-workflow startup wants a full-stack FDE ($150K–$200K + up to 0.3%) who travels to client sites and writes the code no one's written before; finance/PE exposure preferred — the 'technical tip of the spear' framing in its purest form.

Healthcare-AI startup (SF SoMa, fully in-person) pays $180K–$285K for a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to own customer onboarding and on-site clinical deployments — top-of-band comp for a healthcare-embed seat.

Investor-backed maritime AI-perception company hiring an on-site FDE in Birmingham, AL ($105K–$132K) — a rare Deep-South seat and the board's first maritime/defense-perception vertical, taking lab AI out onto vessels.

A digital-adoption unicorn spinning up a Bengaluru-based FDE lead who flies to US & Europe accounts — Whatfix is betting its new GenAI features need embedded engineers, not just CSMs. One of the few senior FDE seats in India that isn't at a pure-play consultancy.

Literally boots-on-the-ground: embed at a customer factory in Dayton to run Machina’s RoboCraftsman robotic sheet-metal-forming cells, tune RoboForming parameters, and debug hardware in production. An FDE role where the ‘deployment’ is a seven-axis robot bending metal, not a SaaS integration — for engineers who want the physical edge of applied AI.

A rare London FDE seat where 'forward deployed' means literally on the factory floor — installing vision-based inspection AI in under 24 hours against an industry standard of ~6 months, debugging static interference and lighting rigs one week, working trade-show booths the next. Embodied-AI deployment for engineers who'd rather ship on a Haribo line than a SaaS dashboard.

The FDE playbook pointed inward: a nuclear-reactor builder hiring a ‘forward deployed’ engineer whose customer isn’t an enterprise account but its own engineering, manufacturing, and regulatory teams — embedding agentic AI into the in-house APEX platform to compress reactor deployment timelines. $195K–$220K for 15+ yrs; one of the few FDE seats where shipping fast is a nuclear-safety problem, not a SaaS metric.

The FDE seat at a freight-tech rocket: $62M raised ($44M Series B, Sept 2025) to put AI voice ‘workers’ on the phones of brokers and carriers. This is Python-plus-customer-ops, not model research — you wire agents into customer TMS/API stacks and prove ROI on a logistics P&L. One of the few FDE roles where ‘production’ means a load actually moves.

A senior FDE seat at the insurance-AI platform funded by the people behind Salesforce, Veeva and Box. $160K–$200K + equity to stay heavily hands-on (Python/JS/SQL) embedding underwriting-workflow AI — and to own the delivery playbooks a growing FDE pod runs on. Insurance is unglamorous; the deployment surface (portfolio strategy, appetite, triage) is unusually deep.

Ground floor of Camunda’s first FDE cohort for ProcessOS — a new product that turns natural-language process descriptions into executable BPMN and self-improves from production data. The mandate is refreshingly concrete: one improving workflow live in 90 days, 3–5 deployed customers in 12 months. A rare chance to define the deployment motion for an agentic-workflow product from zero.

The $1.2B healthcare voice-AI shop — 210M patient interactions, revenue up 20x in 15 months, only healthcare name on the 2026 Enterprise Tech 30 — is staffing the field org, not just R&D. FDEs own health-system go-lives end to end (EHR/telephony integrations, agents handling thousands of daily patient calls) at $155K–$210K + equity.

An FDE function at the blockchain layer: the Avalanche team ships bespoke node/validator/custody solutions for a handful of regulated financial institutions — weeks of heads-down build between syncs, not a meeting-heavy CS cadence. $143K–$179K + token + equity, fully remote, and the JD openly scopes the hire as a future 'FDE #2,' signalling a small, still-forming field org.

The 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboard startup is hiring humans — for the field. YC W24, $35M+ raised, $9M+ ARR, and its AI BDR 'Ava' now needs FDEs to bridge to strategic customers at $175K–$250K + 0.05–0.15% equity. TypeScript full-stack, up to 50% travel, reporting to a dedicated Forward Deployed Lead — the team already exists, this isn't a first hire.

The Kafka-alternative streaming vendor stood up a full FDE org — 'the delivery arm,' reporting to a Head of FDE — to embed builders inside customer codebases on its new Agentic Data Plane. $194K–$229K base, 30–50% travel, and a JD that explicitly benchmarks itself against Palantir FDSE, OpenAI Deployed Engineer and Sierra: infra vendors now copy the labs' field model wholesale.

The public grocery-tech company now runs an FDE pod — 'part startup, part consultancy' — embedding inside retailer and CPG environments to ship agentic AI on top of their stacks. $137K–$144K base is modest for the title, but it's proof the model has jumped from the labs to consumer-internet incumbents chasing enterprise revenue.

The CX-software incumbent is paying $200K–$300K OTE for FDEs to embed with strategic customers and ship its AI Agents and RAG workflows into production. 'Part software engineer, part strategic consultant,' 25–50% travel — about the clearest sign yet that the title is table stakes for public SaaS, not just frontier labs.

Machinify's AI payment-integrity platform touches 270M+ lives across 85+ health plans, including many of the top 20 — and it's hiring FDEs to embed with payers and build on top of it. A rare FDE seat where the deployment surface is the US healthcare claims system itself.

Sixfold's AI agents underwrite billions in premium for the world's largest carriers — and its Senior FDE JD is unusually blunt about wanting Claude Code / Codex-native engineers who orchestrate parallel agents and live in evals and context engineering. A field role that assumes agentic tooling is your default workflow, not a nice-to-have.

Another megabank makes FDE a Director-level seat: Citi wants someone to re-engineer core processes with its in-house AI agents and 'apprentice future experts' inside a 219,000-person institution. Joins BNY, Barclays, and FIS in proving Wall Street now hires FDEs by title, not just by function — and the $170K–$300K band is real, employer-posted, not a Glassdoor estimate.

A 25-year-old analytics vendor posting a $300K FDE ceiling — that band tops most frontier-lab IC floors. Alteryx One rebrands the desktop-workflow company as an AI-data-architecture shop, and the senior, remote-US FDE is the wedge into Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery accounts.

Cognition is standing up a dedicated Federal group around Devin — a foundational Deployed Engineer seat in DC, prior government experience required. The ~$26B autonomous-coding leader building a cleared delivery arm is the clearest tell yet that even Devin's last mile into government is human. Base band reads modest ($95K–$132K); the equity and the ground-floor federal scope are the case.

Jira and Confluence's owner — 300K+ customers — now runs a Principal-tier FDE org for its AI push, with SF, a Seattle Senior Principal req, and a fully-remote AI variant all live at once. $206K–$269K to embed enterprise-scale agent deployments: proof the title has landed at the collaboration-software incumbent, not just the labs.

The first major cybersecurity vendor to put an FDE on AI-runtime security — you embed with customer CISOs, ship low-latency gateway topologies across OpenAI/Anthropic/Bedrock/local vLLM, and upstream your own plugins straight into the core Prisma AIRS engine. Proof the FDE motion has reached security, where the buyer is the CISO, not the CTO.

LangChain calls it 'Deployed Engineer,' not FDE — but it's the same seat: embedding with customers to get agents into production on LangGraph and LangSmith. The framework half the industry prototypes on is now selling the last mile itself. $170K–$190K, Austin with remote flex.

An FDE seat for autonomous science: embed with materials-science and chemistry teams running Lila's 'AI Science Factory.' Flagship Pioneering-backed, and the level-flexible posting means they'll hire the right generalist at any seniority. Proof the FDE motion has jumped from software into the physical lab.

A $50M Series A (Felicis) data/feature-platform company paying $170K–$280K for FDEs who build feature pipelines for cancer detection, fraud prevention, and recommendations. A band that wide on a team this early means real ownership per deployment.

IBM — 114 years old — now posts 'Forward Deploy Engineer' reqs at $144K–$268K. When Big Blue adopts the title, the role has fully crossed from frontier labs into legacy enterprise. Multiple US reqs (Raleigh, Durham) live, from entry level up.

Forward-deployed as a data-science discipline, not an engineering one: Braze (NASDAQ: BRZE) is staffing FD Data Scientists in eight cities across three continents at once. The martech proof that 'forward deployed' has jumped the AI-lab fence — same embed-with-the-customer motion, pointed at churn models instead of agents.

Wealth management is quietly one of the stickiest FDE verticals — the data is messy, the clients are demanding, and nobody re-platforms twice. Addepar, sitting under trillions in tracked assets, is now hiring a remote-US FDE to push its platform deeper into RIA and family-office workflows. $107K–$168K base before equity.

TurboTax's parent wants FDEs to move customers from 'AI pilot' to 'AI in the general ledger.' Intuit Enterprise Suite is hiring embedded engineers at $202.5K–$274K base — a trillion-dollar-adjacent public fintech matching startup FDE comp to own the last mile of accounting automation. The band alone says they're serious.

When the database layer starts hiring FDEs, the pattern is officially infrastructure-wide. MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) just stood up a Forward Deployed Engineering org from scratch — Atlas plus AI app-modernization — spanning seven-plus geos on two continents. IC band $118K–$231K, Senior Staff reaching ~$297K.

Every lab is racing to embed in the Fortune 500; Concourse is putting FDEs in the layer nobody's pricing — the 85+ federal, state, and local agencies still running essential services on systems older than the internet. NYC on-site, $100K–$200K employer-provided, shipping AI into the Hawaii State Judiciary and the LA City Council. Govtech is the FDE frontier hiding in plain sight.

Craig McLuckie — who co-created Kubernetes — is putting a Staff FDE at the center of Stacklok's enterprise motion: the person who invented the platform still needs someone embedded to land it in customers. $200K–$300K employer-provided, Go/RBAC, upstream fixes expected. When even that infra pedigree hires an “in-region anchor” for the last mile, it says the deployment gap doesn't care how good your platform is.

The FDE model reaches hard-tech. Sift — built by SpaceX, Palantir, and Google alumni out of Dragon/Falcon/Starlink telemetry work — embeds engineers to wire its high-frequency observability platform into rockets, drones, and autonomous machines. $150K–$200K + equity, in-office twice a week. Proof the deployment role isn't only SaaS chat agents: it's moving to physical AI, exactly where TechCrunch says FDE demand shifts next.

The founding-FDE pattern keeps compressing. Clera's first non-founder hire is a deployment engineer — employee #1 at a seed-stage shop building conversational agents that run automated B2B product demos, brought on before there's a product team to hand off to. $100K–$200K + founding equity, open to 0–3 yrs. Seed companies now hire the last-mile person before the platform is even finished.

The FDE role just grew an entry rung. Wipro (230K employees) is hiring “Junior FDEs” straight out of school at $68,420–$78,950, with a published ladder: Junior FDE → FDE → Senior/Architect. The frontier-lab version of this title clears $400K+; the services version starts at a sixth of that. Same two words, ~6x comp spread — the clearest sign yet that “FDE” has split into two separate labor markets.

LiveKit is the WebRTC transport layer under the voice-AI boom — it carries OpenAI's Realtime API and ChatGPT voice mode. While everyone chases the model labs, the picks-and-shovels layer every voice agent runs on is quietly hiring FDEs at lab-adjacent comp: the NY band tops out at $320K employer-provided (SF runs lower, ~$140K–$165K). The tell that voice agents have crossed from demo to production.

Proof the FDE motion is leaving software for the physical economy: ex-Samsara engineers pointing agentic AI at trucking back-offices — load coordination, dispatch, driver support — and already autonomously handling ~70% of tasks in production at major US fleets. First FDE hire, ~25% travel to carrier sites, owning the technical close. The unglamorous ROI (call-resolution rate, CSAT, time saved) is exactly why it's a high-agency seat.

The Palantir Foundry core team — the people who built Ontology, Fusion, and Workshop — left to sell the FDE motion back to finance, and they're paying $200K–$280K employer-provided for it. The bet: the model is the commodity, the verifiable 'trust layer' harness is the product. If it's right, this is the highest-leverage seat on the board.

One of the only FDE roles that openly hires new grads — 1+ years, $120K–$180K, and visa sponsorship — where the labs all gate at 5+. If you want the title on your résumé, this is the cheapest ticket in.

The board's first *internal* FDE: Unity isn't deploying to customers — it's embedding an engineer inside its own Finance, Legal, Marketing, and Ops teams to replace manual work with agents, at $228K–$342K employer-provided. The title escaping GTM and turning inward is the signal to watch.

A freight-logistics AI startup standing up its FIRST forward-deployed team — and the bar is just 1–5 years. A rare junior-friendly founding FDE seat, in a vertical (3PL, brokerage, carrier ops) almost nobody else on this board is hiring for. Not to be confused with Augment Code, the AI-coding company.

A Prime Defense Contractor selling an 'AI workforce' for intelligence and cyber work — Accrete's FDEs deploy agents into government and enterprise at software economics, not labor. The census lists it hiring two FDE variants deep, including a PhD-required prompt seat.

A Fortune 500 commercial-real-estate firm posting a Staff FDE at $150K–$280K — the clearest sign yet the title has jumped the tech fence, sitting alongside Seaboard Foods and Bilt on this board. Embedded engineering has officially reached the property-management world.

The campus-recruiting company quietly built 'the fastest-growing AI data business in history' in 2025 — Handshake AI FDEs sit across the table from frontier-lab researchers building evals and benchmarks. A direct Scale/Surge competitor hiring FDEs at both I and Senior levels.

Attio deploys FDEs into its highest-value customers to architect entire GTM stacks live in the room — the rare FDE seat where 'ship JavaScript with Cursor in a customer meeting' is an actual requirement. Two seats (SF + NYC) at a CRM startup that's raised $116M from GV, Redpoint, and Balderton.

Bland's AI voice agents answer real phone calls for some of the world's largest companies — and the FDE owns the build from discovery call to deployment, including on-site training dinners with the champions. Unusually high-touch for a $65M Series B; first month is full-time in the Jackson Square office, then customer sites.

Candid is going after the $250B/year US medical-billing overhead, and it's staffing FDEs three postings deep — including a Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, the tell that this is a real org, not a one-off. Revenue grew ~250% YoY into 200+ provider orgs; $135K–$235K with equity heavily weighted.

A ground-station startup rebuilding earth-to-space connectivity puts the FDE title on classified mission work — $200K employer-provided in DC, 7+ years of mission-ops and capture-engineering experience. Proof the deployment role has reached space and national-security infrastructure, not just SaaS.

The company that sold you IntelliJ now wants an FDE to push 'JetBrains Central' into enterprises — $204K–$306K, fully remote, explicitly targeting ex-Staff/Principal engineers, Heads of Eng, and CTOs. When a 20-year IDE vendor stands up forward deployment for AI governance, the land grab has gone mainstream.

Norm calls it a 'Legal Engineer,' not an FDE — a lawyer who ships and supervises AI compliance agents. $175K–$225K to embed with clients managing $30T in assets, on $140M+ backed by Blackstone, Bain, Vanguard, Citi, and Marc Benioff. Proof the FDE model is escaping software and colonizing the professions.

300+ banks and fintechs across 70 countries, $145M from a16z, Visa, and Experian — Sardine wants an FDE to train custom fraud-fighting agents inside client environments and prove causal impact with its own eval pipelines. Fincrime is quietly one of the densest FDE verticals nobody puts on a slide.

$255K–$351K — one of the top bands on the board this week — for a Staff/Principal FDE at DiDi's Silicon Valley lab, which works on AI security and intelligent-driving tech. A rare mobility/AV deployment seat, and a sign the FDE title has fully crossed from enterprise SaaS into hardware-adjacent autonomy.

The incumbent conceding the wedge: Talkdesk is a Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant Leader, yet it's standing up a full FDE ladder — Staff, Senior, and Principal seats live at once — to defend contact-center AI against the startups (Cresta, Decagon) attacking from below. Principal base is $230K–$275K employer-provided, agentic-AI and multi-agent RAG at the center of the JD. When the category leader decides deployment is the moat, the last mile just got contested.

The original enterprise-AI pure-play — public since 2020, long before the LLM wave — is hiring FDEs eight postings deep across four cities. The $120K–$158K base sits well under the AI-lab bands: same title, priced by a pre-LLM generation that never treated deployment as a scarce skill. Good volume, honest comp, and a real shot at industrial and public-sector accounts most lab FDEs never touch.

A 240-year-old custody bank now runs a formal 'FDE playbook' and an Engineering Hub team hiring at SVP level — the clearest sign yet that forward deployment has escaped tech and landed in Wall Street back-office infrastructure.

The cloud-native core-banking platform out to kill banks' legacy mainframes makes FDEs its 'primary technical interface with the client' — embedding them inside bank engineering teams to ship Vault into production. Deployment is the wedge for replacing 40-year-old COBOL.

Hebbia sells AI to the buy-side and law firms, and its FDE band tops out at $300K — among the highest published for a non-founding seat. The strict 5-days-in-office rule (NYC or SF, no remote) is the tell: at that comp you're really being hired as the customer's embedded quant.

Distyl is the ex-Palantir crowd running OpenAI's enterprise deployments — 'working AI systems within a quarter' is the pitch. $150–250K with 25–50% travel: this is the Palantir FDE model reborn as an OpenAI channel, staffed hard across healthcare, finance, supply chain and insurance.

$3M to $80M ARR in three years, profitable, unicorn — Vannevar is the defense-AI story nobody outside the Beltway talks about. The FDE is the field 'CTO' for a mission team, but the moat is the clearance: TS/SCI, DC-based, so the candidate pool is tiny and $150–215K + equity reflects scarcity, not generosity.

The widest band on the board — $113K to $300K in a single req — because Zipline wants a 'startup CTO inside Zipline' who reports to the Head of Operations, not Engineering. FDE is escaping software: here it means wiring GenAI into aviation and logistics for the world's largest drone-delivery network.

The French agentic-AI lab calls FDE 'the fastest-growing job category at H' — it hired a dedicated Head of FDE and is scaling the team hard. When a frontier-model shop makes deployment its growth engine instead of an afterthought, that's the signal; $150–200K in the US, seats in Austin and Paris.

A rare Toronto FDE seat: Ribbon's always-on voice-AI interviewer (Fast Company Most Innovative 2026) embeds engineers to wire its screening agent into enterprise recruiting workflows. Canadian FDE roles barely exist on this board.

The FDE title just reached the Fortune 5. UnitedHealth is paying up to $348K for an engineer to embed with payers and providers and ship AI into claims and care workflows — the clearest sign yet the role has escaped tech and landed inside the largest healthcare company on earth.

Warp's first dedicated implementation hire — a founding FDE to drag its 'ambient agents' out of pilots and into customers' own Docker/Kubernetes clusters, wiring up GitHub Actions, Jira and Slack. When a back-office-automation startup makes its first FDE a founding seat, the deployment is the product.

Console is pointing state-of-the-art agents at enterprise IT workflows — the least glamorous, highest-ROI corner of automation. An on-site SF FDE at $180K–$280K to prove that the boring internal-ticket stuff is exactly where agents pay for themselves.

$20B+ of CPG revenue across 200+ brands — OLIPOP, Tropicana, Dr. Squatch — runs on Confido, and the FDE is the one turning messy cash-application, deduction and trade-promotion workflows into production software. YC-backed, fresh $15M Series A, relocation covered.

The world's largest IT-infrastructure services firm — IBM's ~80,000-person spinoff — now wants 'the engineer customers ask for by name.' Multiple FDE reqs live in Dallas at up to $252K: the managed-services industry has officially discovered the deployment engineer.

A YC-backed decision engine for banks and fintechs staffing FDEs three levels deep — entry-level through Lead at $200K–$300K — across NYC, Berlin, and London. One of the few FDE ladders anywhere with real German-market seats.

Fully remote defense FDE work at $149K–$201K — roughly half what SF AI labs pay for the same job title — and the JD goes out of its way to say "this is not an ML research position." The differentiator isn't model skill, it's shipping RAG into air-gapped Kubernetes, which is a genuinely scarcer competence than the comp band implies.

A $1B-funded defense company founded in 2022 asks for only "at least one year" of relevant experience on a band that tops out at $240K — the widest experience-to-comp gap on the board right now. CHAOS is betting that clearance eligibility plus RF-adjacent curiosity is rarer than seniority, which is a reasonable read of the El Segundo talent market.

The customers here are Teradyne's own sales, finance and ops teams — this FDE reports into a Chief AI Officer org and deploys internally, not to clients. A 50-year-old test-and-automation company paying up to $271K for an inward-facing FDE is the clearest sign yet that "forward deployed" has detached from the customer and now just means "the engineer who makes AI actually land somewhere."

Almost every FDE listing right now is an LLM job wearing a deployment hat; this one wants vision-language and visual foundation models pointed at defect inspection and PLC/SCADA integration. The 2x band width ($150K–$300K) says Matroid hasn't decided whether it's hiring a CV researcher or a field engineer — and the JD reads like it genuinely wants both.

Listed in the FDE census, but Nooks has renamed the seat "Agent Engineer" — and then gone further than most FDE roles dare, giving the engineer GM-level responsibility for customer revenue with a 5x meetings-booked target in a one-month trial. Watch this title: when the deployment engineer owns the customer's number, "forward deployed" starts sounding understated.

Twilio's FDE writes production Python/TypeScript/Node directly inside customer codebases and runs 'builder hackathons' at flagship accounts — a public infra company treating forward deployment as a growth motion, not a support function. Fully remote, still rare for the role. The JD is refreshingly blunt: a 'hands-on contributor alongside customer engineers, not just an advisor.'

A top-US pork producer — Fortune 500 agribusiness — is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to keep its Renewable Natural Gas and Live Operations systems reliable and accurate. The clearest signal yet that the FDE title has escaped tech entirely: same role, now embedded in hog barns and biogas plants instead of AI labs.

An AI-security startup (from CMU's Zico Kolter and Andy Zou) at ~25 people is already standing up forward deployment — building real-time threat detection and adaptive defenses inside customer environments. FDE-as-security is a niche the big deployment shops don't touch.

Monte Carlo built the data-observability category and is now pointing its FDE team at agent reliability — the pitch is that you own the account from close to fully-live. The $120K–$150K senior band is modest by frontier-lab standards, but this is a rare fully-remote FDE seat at an established unicorn where the work is real integration engineering (Snowflake, Databricks, Salesforce) rather than demo theater.

Mem0 is betting the whole company on 'memory as infrastructure' for AI apps, and its first FDEs are the ones proving that thesis inside customer stacks — SDKs, data models, privacy constraints, POC-to-production. If the memory layer becomes as load-bearing as vector DBs did, being the FDE who wired it into the early design partners is a strong seat.

Anterior frames its FDE as a 'hands-on AI startup CTO for the client' — you own high-stakes clinical prior-authorization deployments end to end. Backed by Sequoia, NEA and Neo with DeepMind/Google-AI/Inflection founders as angels, it's one of the more credibly-funded healthcare-AI shops running a real forward-deployed motion rather than a services team in disguise.

An FDE seat at a formal-reasoning / physics-AI research shop is a genuine rarity — most deep-tech labs never build a customer-facing deployment role at all. Three-continent footprint (Boston, Toronto, Singapore) and a research-adjacent mandate make this the closest thing on the board to 'FDE, but you also have to understand the science.'

A clean 'founding FDE' title with a $180K–$260K band at a seed-stage SF startup — this is the archetype the whole category runs on: employee-single-digits, you define the deployment playbook before anyone writes it down. The comp is aggressive for pre-Series-A, which usually means they're trading cash for someone who can carry the first enterprise logos solo.

Alloy is an established identity-and-fraud decisioning platform, so a 'founding' FDE here isn't a two-person gamble — it's a proven fintech deciding its enterprise integrations now need a dedicated forward-deployed owner. $166K–$250K in NYC, embedding in banks' and fintechs' risk stacks: high regulatory surface, high stickiness, and a domain moat most generalist FDEs can't clear.

A consumer loyalty/rewards unicorn running an FDE motion is the odd one out — this role is usually an enterprise-B2B animal, so seeing Bilt pay $200K–$240K for one suggests the deployment work is with its merchant and property-partner networks, not end consumers. It's a useful data point that 'forward deployed' is escaping pure enterprise SaaS into consumer-fintech partnerships.

Neha Narkhede's (Confluent co-founder) AI Risk Decisioning company calls the FDE 'the most technically complete role at Oscilar' — embedding engineers to design agentic fraud, credit, and compliance systems inside banks and fintechs. Founder pedigree plus a fully-remote seat.

Lovable scaled to millions of builders with no deployed-engineering org — this is the founding seat, 5+ yrs full-stack (React/TS), embedding with its 'most ambitious customers to translate impossible ideas into real products.' You set the playbooks for FDE at one of the fastest-growing AI app builders.

Exa builds the search engine agents actually run on, and calls its FDE 'the technical tip of the spear' — the person who turns messy enterprise integrations into production wins. A rare deployed-engineering seat on the retrieval layer that sits underneath every agent stack.

Firecrawl turns any website into LLM-ready data and is one of the most-used primitives in the agent stack; $160K–$220K for an FDE shipping customer integrations, with a second broader FDE seat ($150K–$250K) open too — a small YC team standing up deployed engineering as demand outruns headcount.

Avallon (YC X25) builds AI agents for insurance-claims ops and 10x'd revenue in three months during YC; a founding FDE at $140K–$210K plus up to a full point of equity, and it only asks 3+ yrs. Early-stage upside on a claims-automation wedge into a '$100B opportunity.'

Reducto's document-parsing platform grew revenue 7x YoY, and this founding FDE owns on-prem/VPC/air-gapped deployments with 'strict latency targets' at $150K–$300K. Doc-AI deals are won or lost in exactly this deployment hell — custom auth, air-gaps, regression evals — which is why the band is so wide.

Retell hit $36M ARR with a team of 20 building voice AI for contact centers and pays 'top 5 percentile' — $215K–$290K for a senior FDE shipping enterprise CRM/ERP integrations. One of the leanest ARR-per-head stories in the census, now hiring deployed engineers to keep pace with enterprise demand.

Commure is building an 'AI operating system for healthcare' at a $7B valuation, and its FDE embeds with hospital clients (up to 50% travel) to ship ambient-AI and autonomous RCM. Healthcare is the hardest deployment environment there is — HIPAA, EHR integrations, clinician trust — and this seat is aimed squarely at it.

Edison Scientific's Kosmos 'AI scientist' runs hundreds of research tasks in parallel, compressing months of R&D into one run; its forward-deployed AI engineer ($200K–$350K) embeds on-site with a top science org — explicitly 'not remote support or implementation consulting.' After Normal Computing's silicon play, the rarest vertical in the census: FDE for frontier scientific discovery.

Figma is standing up an FDE motion around Make Local, its new design-to-code developer workflow — embedding engineers with strategic customers to unblock adoption and feed the product. When a design giant with millions of users spins up forward-deployed engineering, the title has fully crossed into mainstream software. $152.8K–$296K is a wide leveling band for a function it's building from scratch.

OpenHands (the open-source AI coding agent, formerly OpenDevin) hires an FDE to own hands-on installs of OpenHands Enterprise on customer-managed infra — Kubernetes, Helm, OAuth delegation, MCP connectors, agentic SDLC use cases like CVE remediation and issue-to-PR. $175K–$240K base plus equity; a rare deployed-engineering seat where the product is open source and the hard part is the on-prem last mile.

P-1 AI is building 'Archie,' an AI engineer agent for the physical world (mechanical/electrical/aerospace design), and its FDE is the technical lead who wires Archie into real engineering workflows and fine-tunes it on customer data. It explicitly wants a physical-engineering background — one of the only FDE seats that asks for aerospace/mechanical chops, not just backend. Rarest vertical on the board after silicon and drug discovery.

GC AI builds the AI platform for in-house legal teams (97.5% of customers see value inside month one, per the company), and its FDE band runs $165K–$350K — a 2x spread that says they'll level you anywhere from senior IC to near-staff. Legal AI's deployment race is on (Harvey, CoCounsel, Legora), and GC AI is staffing the last mile remote-first across the US and Canada.

An $83B Fortune Global 500 hardware giant is running a company-wide AI transformation and calling the builders 'Forward Deployed Engineers' — embedded inside its own business functions, not customer sites, on a Microsoft Copilot/Azure OpenAI/ServiceNow stack. $220K–$310K, and the clearest sign yet the title now means 'high-autonomy engineer who ships adopted AI,' whether the deployment is inward or outward.

A next-gen industrial company (1,100+ employees) puts an FDE inside its Digital Innovation Group — embedded on actual factory floors up to 75% of the time, prototyping full-stack and agentic solutions for manufacturing, quality, and supply-chain ops. This is 'forward deployed' in the literal, hard-hat sense: the customers are Re:Build's own plants, and the domain barrier is industrial, not just technical.

Alguna (YC S23) is rebuilding B2B quote-to-cash — CPQ, usage metering, billing — and its FDE ships customer integrations end-to-end across CRMs and ERPs. At $80K–$125K it's the low end of the FDE band, but it's a genuine early-stage, remote-across-four-countries seat where you own implementations from 'what do you need?' to 2am hotfix. The comp is modest; the ownership and equity are the pitch.

The only seat on this board where 'forward deployed' is literal — you deploy autonomy systems in austere field environments, not a SaaS dashboard. $113K–$155K is defense-wage, well under lab tier; the comp here is the mission and the clearance path, not the number.

Six FDE seats across four regions at the observability layer every agent deployment eventually hits — evals is the most durable skill in the FDE toolkit, and Arize does it all day. $125K–$175K in the US, $155K–$225K in EMEA; the geographic spread is the tell that this is a real GTM motion, not a support function.

A robotics-automation startup building its FDE bench three postings deep — Robotics, Vision & ML, and an Edge-Frameworks/FDE-tooling seat — at $160K–$200K + equity to deploy FactoryOS on real factory floors. This is the corner of the market where 'forward deployed' means a hard hat, not a Zoom call.

AI-for-silicon from ex-Synopsys/Cadence/GlobalFoundries and Stanford SAIL founders, Sequoia-backed — an FDE seat that embeds inside the world's largest chipmakers' design flows. Like Normal Computing, it's a vertical almost no other FDE can touch, and the EDA domain barrier is the real moat on your comp.

A $145M-funded edge-sync database trusted by Delta, Chick-fil-A, and the US military, now hiring FDEs five postings deep including a DC/defense seat. The work is genuinely hard — peer-to-peer CRDT sync across offline and intermittently-connected devices — which is exactly why it's FDE-shaped rather than a solutions-engineering rebrand.

CoCounsel — legal AI used by a million professionals across 20,000+ firms and most of the Am Law 100 — is standing up a Forward Deployed Engineering team from SWE through Staff/Architect. When a 150-year-old information giant runs a full FDE ladder, the title has fully crossed into legacy enterprise.

Tied 1st for 'talent density' in a widely-shared X poll — and its Forward Deployed 'Agent Builder' seat is the delivery arm behind AI agents for Cash App, Chime, and Oura. $175K–$230K base at a $4.5B valuation; the equity, not the base, is the case.

The autonomy company runs an FDE seat that's basically an embedded startup CTO — integrating its Vehicle OS and autonomy stacks into DoD platforms in the field. $145K–$190K, US citizenship and a security clearance required; the clearance is the durable premium.

The GTM-data rocket — $5B valuation, $100M+ ARR, Sequoia — hires a 'Forward Deployed GTM Engineer,' the FDE motion crossing fully into go-to-market. Customers include Anthropic, Notion, and Ramp; you embed to build their growth workflows.

A bio-AI FDE: you're the technical face to biopharma partners, wiring Chai's molecular-interaction models into wet-lab and in-silico workflows. Proof the FDE motion has reached drug discovery — a vertical almost no other FDE has touched.

A 'Founding' Forward Deployed ML Engineer at a young lab hiring across SF, Singapore, and India at once — founding scope on the customer-facing edge, where you 'operate at the bleeding edge of our technology and our customers' most consequential problems simultaneously.'

Founded by the Stanford AI Lab PhDs who invented State Space Models — now embedding FDEs to push agentic voice into on-prem and VPC enterprise stacks. $180K–$250K + equity for 4 years' backend is mid-band, but the SSM pedigree and Databricks/Index/Lightspeed cap table are the real comp.

$300M+ ARR, 5x growth, a $4.65B Series C — and the FDE team ships open source (they contribute to SGLang) while tuning inference for Suno, Lovable, and Cognition. Only 2 years' ML asked; the job is GPU-level performance work at frontier labs, not slideware.

The rare FDE that's hands-on-hardware: you're the first responder for a live robot fleet at one of the hottest robotics foundation-model labs, not embedding at a customer. Asks just 2 years and a B.S. — because almost nobody has actually debugged multi-robot fleets in production.

An $11B, $781M-raised voice-AI leader running a fully remote-global FDE seat — rare for a function usually chained to on-site enterprise work. The paper bar is unusually low ('customers in student clubs count'); the real bar is high: you own end-to-end builds for their most strategic accounts.

A European FDE seat at the Next.js company: you embed to lead enterprise Next.js migrations and ship production AI agents inside customer codebases. Wants 5 years and expert TypeScript — the customer roster is OpenAI, PayPal, and Ramp. One of the few frontier-adjacent FDE roles based in London/Berlin.

A defense/aerospace digital-engineering FDE that reports into Customer Success, not sales — so the career trajectory stays technical. You integrate Istari's platform into live CAD, CFD, FEM, and simulation pipelines inside mission-critical programs. Rare Florida 'Space Coast' FDE seat, and a toolchain that narrows the candidate pool to people who actually know engineering software.

The only FDE seat where you live inside SystemVerilog and UVM testbenches — Normal calls itself a 'frontier AI lab for silicon,' embedding engineers with the world's largest chipmakers to cut EDA cost 1,000x. $180K–$325K to own a vertical almost no other FDE can touch.

Snorkel is standing up a whole FDE org in one shot — IC, Manager, and Head of Forward Deployed Engineering all posted together ($220K–$350K OTE at the top). The IC seat pays $150K–$320K; the tell is that a data-centric-AI company now packages forward-deployed delivery as a product for 'leading labs.'

A generative-video FDE seat that turns Luma's models into production systems on a customer's data — and only asks for 2+ years, with an explicit 'we're not looking for unicorns' pitch that quietly undercuts the usual FDE bar. $170K–$290K, embed-with-the-customer model.

Groq literally frames the job as 'a hands-on AI startup CTO' — deploy and optimize inference on their LPU stack inside customer orgs, up to 50% travel. $143,600–$289,100, and one of the few FDE seats on the chip side of the inference war rather than the model side.

$200K–$400K is the widest band in this week's mid-cap batch — and it's Meticulous's first US FDE seat, establishing the function from scratch. Their AI writes test suites automatically; the customer list (Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, CoreWeave) is the pitch.

An $11B company serving 100,000+ lawyers across 1,300 orgs is only now hiring its founding FDE — legal AI's category leader conceding the last mile of agent deployment needs embedding.

America's open-frontier-lab bet — $2B raised, reportedly seeking $25B — is hiring FDEs five postings deep, including a Seoul seat and an 'LLM post-training' FDE variant no other lab offers.

Perplexity wraps its FDE role in a Member of Technical Staff title — lab branding for what is functionally an enterprise deployment seat, and its first in NYC.

With Apple's req last week, every trillion-dollar company now posts FDE roles. Microsoft's ceiling ($235K) sits below OpenAI's floor ($350K) — same title, 3x spread; the premium is proximity to the model, not the work.

Four GTM-FDE seats across SF, Tokyo, Munich, and Paris — including one of the only FDE roles in Japan anywhere in the 1,206-posting Plank census (CC BY 4.0).

The FLUX team's forward-deployed seat — proof the FDE motion has spread from LLM labs to image gen. Requires actual diffusion-model internals knowledge, which shrinks the candidate pool to near zero.

The most precise comp band in the 1,206-posting Plank census — a $20K spread where everyone else posts $200K ranges. Anyscale knows exactly what this seat is worth; Ray sits under half the industry's training stacks.

Four parallel 'Forward Deployed Agent Builder' postings across SF, NYC, Vancouver, and São Paulo — Brex is standing up a global FDE function, and the non-US seats are among the only LatAm/Canada FDE roles anywhere.

A Series-F company hiring 'Founding' FDEs — proof the function is brand new even where the company isn't. Three seats open, one fully remote.

Baseten is hiring the FDE manager and the ICs simultaneously — join the org on day zero, or run it.

A seed-stage company posting a $500K ceiling — the second-widest band in the 1,206-posting Plank census after Tenex. Either desperation or conviction; both are worth an interview.

India's sovereign-AI lab is hiring FDEs four postings deep — the Mistral playbook replayed for a market of 1.4B, and the first Bengaluru seat on this board.

Accenture licensed Palantir's playbook: the new Accenture Palantir Business Group runs a full FDE career ladder (engineer → senior → managing) — the widest-volume entry into Foundry/AIP work outside Palantir itself.

HackerRank is standing up an FDE function from scratch — a Director search plus ICs on three continents at once. Early enough to shape the playbook, at a company every engineer already knows.

Replit is hiring someone to build its FDE org from zero at $300–400K — proof the role now has a management track, not just an IC ceiling.

Every enterprise agent deployment hits the same wall — who is this agent and what can it touch? Okta just made answering that a Principal-level FDE job.

A top-5 pharma is standing up a three-level FDE org — Exec Director, Director, and IC postings live simultaneously. The clearest signal yet that the title has escaped tech.

Cap-table and fund-admin SaaS for private-fund managers is standing up a brand-new FDE function that sits at the intersection of deployment, applied AI, and quant modeling. $180K–$270K, fully remote — a rare remote bet from an otherwise in-office NYC company — for a builder who can take vague fund-ops requirements to working systems.

The widest comp band in all 1,206 postings in the Plank census — $600K at the top — from a company most candidates haven't heard of. That asymmetry is the opportunity.

A frontier-lab FDE seat attached to the X API — and a $260K spread in the posted band means they'll level you wherever you can argue your way to.

Bret Taylor's agent company invented the modern agent-deployment motion — the infra variant of the role is rarer and pays accordingly.

The last major holdout just adopted the title. When Apple posts an FDE req, the role is officially industry-standard.

Nvidia pays like a lab for the architect flavor — and every serious enterprise GPU deployment eventually routes through this team.

The fourth trillion-dollar company to post an FDE role inside a month, after Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. This one embeds inside AWS Marketing to rebuild content workflows with agents and MCPs. Base tops out at $262K in SF — and that's before the sign-on and RSUs.

Salesforce publicly committed to hiring 1,000 FDEs — the single largest FDE hiring wave in the market. Easier entry point than the labs.

A ~60-year-old payments and banking-core giant is standing up an AI-native FDE practice — a Principal seat plus a second, standard FDE req live at the same time. When FIS embeds engineers to ship LLM agents into bank back offices, the title has officially reached the Fortune 500.

Google's newest AI role — the Gemini enterprise push finally has a deployment arm, and early hires shape it.

Ramp is building a dedicated FDE function while growing revenue as fast as any fintech in history — high equity upside.

The strongest FDE option in Europe — Mistral is the default lab for EU enterprises and governments with data-sovereignty requirements.

Rare fully-remote FDE role at scale — Databricks runs one of the most mature FDE functions outside Palantir.

EY launched dedicated FDE roles in April — the most accessible entry point into the FDE career path, with global offices.

Cohere is all-in on enterprise — FDEs are the core go-to-market motion, not a support function.

8 open FDE roles at a company small enough that FDEs talk directly to founders — maximal ownership per deployment.

Rippling's FDE function is brand new — join early enough to set the playbook rather than follow it.

Eval and data-quality work is the most durable skill in the FDE toolkit — Labelbox FDEs do it all day.

Contact-center AI is one of the few categories with proven ROI — Cresta FDEs ship deployments that visibly move customer P&L.

One of the only globally-remote FDE roles — deploy AI at the edge for customers on Cloudflare's developer platform.

Scale's Donovan and enterprise GenAI work spans defense and Fortune 500 — unusual breadth, and a path to cleared work that pays a premium.

Fin is one of the highest-volume production AI agents in the world — FDEs here optimize systems handling millions of conversations.

Snowflake's answer to Databricks' FDE motion — remote-friendly and sits on top of half the enterprise data in America.

All-remote company with a mature async culture — the most sustainable-lifestyle FDE role on this list.

Stripe engineering brand plus customer-facing autonomy — FDEs here work with the largest platforms integrating payments and AI.