FDE Jobs

OpenAI is cloning its FDE org by vertical, not just by geo: this is a dedicated Legal seat alongside brand-new Healthcare and Semiconductor reqs — the same org-chart move Anthropic made two weeks ago, now visible at the other frontier lab too. Published band ($185K–$300K) is real money for embedding with law firms.

The clearest sign yet that OpenAI is building the same FDE org-chart Anthropic revealed two weeks ago: a dedicated people-manager seat over the FDE bench, paying $302K–$385K — more than the $185K–$300K vertical IC seats (Legal, Healthcare) posted the same month. Management layers arriving this fast means the FDE function has outgrown "a few founding hires" at both labs simultaneously.

Founding FDE seat at a startup betting against the LLM-wrapper playbook entirely: co-founded by ex-Microsoft VP Dan Roth and UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein, Khosla-backed, and built on APT-1, a model the company says "reasons deterministically" rather than via prompting. If that claim holds up in enterprise deployments, this is one of the more differentiated FDE seats on the board right now — not another Claude/GPT integration shop.

Anthropic's newest FDE req — and the rare one that publishes a real band: £200K–£300K employer-provided (≈$260K–$390K), richer than the US posting's $280K–$320K *base* and well above the "Not disclosed" Munich/Tokyo reqs. It lands inside a full Applied AI org that now runs geo-specific FDE seats (US, Paris, Munich, London, Tokyo), FDE managers in NYC and London, a Pre-Sales Program Lead for FDE, and Technical Deployment Leads — the forward-deployed motion has graduated from a handful of founding hires into a staffed function. London is the EMEA financial-services beachhead.

When the founder of DeepLearning.AI starts hiring FDEs, the archetype has officially arrived. AI Aspire — Andrew Ng's enterprise-AI advisory arm, inside the AI Fund / DeepLearning.AI flywheel — is building its own forward-deployed bench: embed at enterprise clients for 1–3 week engagements to redesign workflows and ship LLM/agent solutions, then build internal tooling from Mountain View between gigs. The JD asks flat-out for Claude Code and Codex fluency. Advisory shop money ($180K–$200K) for the FDE playbook applied to AI transformation.

The $140K spread is the whole story: a Series B voice-AI startup ($1B valuation, $125M raised, 10x in 2025) is willing to pay founding-engineer money for someone who embeds with home-services brands, owns the build end-to-end, and lets what they learn in the field steer the core roadmap. Note the title — Forward Deployed *Product* Engineer — Avoca is explicitly wiring the deployment loop back into product, not treating it as post-sale glue. Next.js/Node/Postgres/AWS stack, NYC-in-office, in a $1T market where 85% of missed calls go to a competitor.

The clearest sign yet that FDE has escaped software entirely: Picarro is a 65-patent scientific-instruments maker (cavity ring-down spectroscopy for methane and EtO), and its FDE embeds at refineries and chemical plants to make real-time emissions data actually land with Environmental, HSSE, and Operations teams. The tell is the travel band — up to 70% on-site — because the deployment is physical, not a Slack integration. This is the Palantir FDE model rebuilt for smokestacks, and a rare doorway for engineers who know sensor/field data over LLMs.

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 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.

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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

A forward-deployed role where the deliverable is a post-trained model, not an integration: you build the RL environment, run the experiments, and ship what works. The $150K–$300K band and a London/remote option make it one of the few research-grade FDE seats open outside SF.

A rare India FDE seat that prints a number: ₹10–13 LPA for a YC W22 agentic-finance company, aimed at 0.5–2 years of experience. The interview asks you to submit a transcript of your coding-agent session, which tells you how they screen for AI-native builders.

A 14-person YC team with 700+ paying customers (ServiceNow, Replit, Ramp) hiring its founding FDE, and it's the rare remote seat with a printed band: $120K–$200K plus 0.05–0.15%. Half the job is customer calls, half is shipping full-stack product.

AWS now runs a dedicated Forward Deployed Engineering practice with Senior and Principal bands listed side by side, and the senior seat is asked to build reusable accelerators for the wider FDE org, not only ship for one customer.

One of the first two engineers on Axion's first FDE team, building AI-enabled quality workflows for manufacturers (backed by Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures, Boeing, RTX). Strong band and explicit path for strong SWEs without the FDE title.

Founded by ex-Googlers, Point11 embeds FDEs inside enterprise customers to rebuild storefronts for the agent era, including MCP servers for live catalog, pricing and inventory. Published band, real client-codebase work.

Seven open seats at once at a voice-AI company building India's government-backed voice-to-voice foundation model. The bar is 3–5 years of Python backend plus LLM prompting, so this is the accessible, engineering-heavy end of FDE in India, with no pay band posted.

One of the few FDE internships on the board: a 10-14 week summer program in which you own a customer problem from day one, with conversion to a full-time FDE role after graduation. Starts May or June.

The London twin of Pace's NYC seat, part of an 8-role London build-out at a company of under 40 people. Insurance is a Lloyd's-market sweet spot for FDEs, and equity-heavy startup seats like this rarely publish a band.

A sub-40-person insurance-ops AI company pitching FDE as the founder track: you ship features, integrations and evals for the largest insurers, with a stated path to Applied AI lead or GM of a business line. Equity is the comp story here; no band is posted.

A client-embedded technical leader role in regulated environments, 7+ years of AI/ML required. Dublin is where EY is pairing FDE with financial-services and public-sector compliance work. No band published.

EY is building FDE capacity in Poland (Katowice, Warsaw) at the GDS delivery hub, an unusually senior bar (8+ years) for a Big Four seat. Lead production deployments of LLM, RAG and agentic systems; no band, but Polish tech-market pay applies.

A 3+ year bar makes this the most accessible EY FDE seat on the board: embed with financial and insurance clients and move GenAI prototypes into production. Azure-leaning stack; Big Four brand, not Big Tech pay.

EY is staffing FDE pods with a hands-on tech lead on top, the same squad structure frontier labs use, translated to a consulting model. Worth tracking as the template for how Big Four firms scale FDE.

Istari's FDE seat has moved from the Florida Space Coast to Dayton, Ohio, the Air Force research hub. Same $143K–$165K band, same clearance-eligible, US-citizen bar, and the same reporting line into Customer Success, so the track stays technical.

A YC defense-supply-chain startup with 7-figure ARR hiring FDEs open to new grads: you spend weekdays on-site at distributors in WI, NY, Miami and LA. Modest cash, but 5–10 bps equity at a 15–20 person company is a real stake; US citizens and visa holders only.

Cursor opened FDE, Field Engineer and Solutions Architect seats across Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai at once. A three-city India build-out signals enterprise coding-agent demand there is real. Band undisclosed, so benchmark against the India FDE range on the board.

Rare disclosed equity: 10–20 bps for an FDE who owns bank launches from kickoff through hypercare. Caveat: the founder's X post quoted $80K–$120K while the careers page says $140K–$180K, so confirm the band before you apply.

OpenAI's first London FDE seat on the board: own delivery across multiple deployments, relocation assistance offered, and up to 50% travel. UK enterprise is where the Agents/Codex rollouts land next, and no band is published.

A language-gated FDE seat: professional Spanish plus English, based in London. OpenAI is staffing by customer geography (LatAm and Iberia accounts) rather than by office, a quiet signal about where enterprise demand is.

Seoul joins Tokyo as OpenAI's second APAC FDE hub. Chaebol-scale customers, 50% travel, no band published. Korea is now an FDE market, not an afterthought.

A $180K–$250K base is top-of-market for a non-lab FDE, but the posting sits in the GTM department. Ask whether field work feeds product and whether you stay after go-live; if it reports to quota, it's solutions engineering with a better title.

Fluidstack is back with three FDE seats at once, split by function rather than customer — compute operations here, supply chain and data-center delivery in the siblings. FDE as an internal-builder title, at the company delivering gigawatt-scale AI compute.

The delivery-side FDE seat at Fluidstack: engineering the pipeline that turns data-center sites into live compute. Comp isn't posted, so ask early.

Supply chain is the bottleneck in AI data-center delivery, and Fluidstack is staffing it with FDEs instead of ops analysts — the 'deploy inward' version of the title.

Second new OpenAI vertical FDE req this month: healthcare, requiring real Epic/HL7/FHIR fluency, not just LLM chops — a tell that the FDE motion is now being staffed by domain experts first, engineers second. Same $185K–$300K band as the Legal seat, but with 6+ years required (vs. 5+) and 50% travel.

OpenAI's first standalone Tokyo FDE seat — mirrors the APAC build-out pattern Anthropic already ran (Tokyo) and Sierra runs today (Tokyo infra seat). Requires bilingual Japanese/English fluency, so this isn't a remote-from-anywhere role — it's a bet on a Tokyo-based enterprise practice.

OpenRouter — the de facto default LLM routing layer for a huge chunk of the indie/startup AI stack — posting its first FDE-flavored seat is a tell: infra companies that used to be self-serve-only are now embedding with customers the same way frontier labs do. The job is unusually infra-native: routing, fallback, caching, and cost optimization instead of the usual "build agents" mandate.

Founders Fund-backed insurance-claims agent startup that says it hit multi-seven-figure ARR in its first year — fast enough traction that it's now hiring an FDE to own client deployments end-to-end rather than having founders do it themselves. Comp is vague ("top quartile") but the growth story is the real signal here.

Security gets its own FDE track at AWS: threat-modeling and securing production AI systems inside customer environments. Same org, a different skill set, US citizenship required.

A DoD-born agentic-AI startup (partnered with Palantir, Nvidia, HPE, Oracle) hiring an FDE to sit inside classified spaces 80–100% of the week and ship 'app packs' on its platform — explicitly 'not a traditional product or platform engineering role.' It's the Palantir FDE playbook run by Palantir's own partners: TS/SCI + SCI eligibility, US citizens only, $160K–$200K. The tell is the clearance gate — the fastest-growing FDE frontier isn't the AI labs, it's cleared defense work where the deployment literally can't happen remotely.

The company that lit the fuse on generative AI with Stable Diffusion is now staffing FDEs — proof the role has jumped from LLM/enterprise-software land into generative *media*. This seat embeds with creative and enterprise teams (think EA, Universal/Warner Music, WPP) to wire image/video/3D/vector models into real production pipelines: VFX, games, ad, e-commerce. Mid-level bar (4+ yrs), remote US, comp undisclosed — the interesting tell is the skill stack (controllable generation, multi-view consistency, brand-constrained output), not a salary band.

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.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Maryland; Virginia; Washington, DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

AWS's named FDE org is hiring again with real posted bands: $193K–$262K base in the Bay, plus RSUs and 30–50% travel. Amazon's FDE seats pay base-heavy and equity-light versus the labs.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' national security deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts; Delaware; Maryland; remote in California; remote in New York; remote in Washington DC; Virginia; West Virginia at a transparent $182K–$250K. A clearance-track national-security FDE seat — the highest-margin, least salary-transparent corner of deployment work, and Databricks is now openly staffing it.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Berlin, Germany; Munich, Germany (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Bengaluru, India (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Austin, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Remote - Washington DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in San Francisco, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in the US at $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team remote in Virginia; Remote - Washington DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' national security deployment team in the US at $182K–$250K. A clearance-track national-security FDE seat — the highest-margin, least salary-transparent corner of deployment work, and Databricks is now openly staffing it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 '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 $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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Tokyo, Japan (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

A US carrier running an internal 'Forward Deployment Engineering' practice with a Principal IC band topping out near $297K base plus 20% bonus, and the role is measured on 'validated ROI across the FDE portfolio'. The FDE title is leaving the AI-lab bubble.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Berlin, Germany; Munich, Germany (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Berkeley, California; California; Los Angeles, California; San Diego, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in the US at $153K–$210K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in the Central US at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Austin, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Dallas, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Denver, Colorado at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Remote - California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in the Northeast & Southeast US at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

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 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.

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.

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.

$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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.'

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 300-year-old bank just posted an FDE role at VP level to 'reinvent Investment Banking Research through AI' — LangChain/CrewAI, RAG, MCP tool-calling, AWS Bedrock, embedded with senior stakeholders. When Barclays borrows Palantir's job title for its Markets division — and runs parallel reqs in London and Glasgow — the FDE motion has officially crossed into finance. $150–200K base before bonus.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

$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.

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.'

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).

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.

Sr. Staff FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Singapore (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

Staff FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Remote - India (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in the Central US at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Atlanta, Georgia at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Dallas, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Charlotte, North Carolina at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in Washington, DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

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

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.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Seoul, South Korea (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Sydney, Australia (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Seoul, South Korea (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in the US at $153K–$210K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Western Australia, Australia (comp not disclosed for this geo). Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' digital native deployment team in Mountain View, California; San Francisco, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Digital-native / emerging-enterprise FDE seats target fast-scaling startups — the accounts most likely to adopt agent frameworks early.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Dallas, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Austin, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Atlanta, Georgia at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' manufacturing deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.

Senior FDE on Databricks' manufacturing deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.

Senior FDE on Databricks' manufacturing deployment team in Seattle, Washington at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in San Francisco, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Los Angeles, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Seattle, Washington at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Dallas, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Austin, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Atlanta, Georgia at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Washington, DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Denver, Colorado at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Mountain View, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in Raleigh, North Carolina at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' digital native deployment team in London, United Kingdom (comp not disclosed for this geo). Digital-native / emerging-enterprise FDE seats target fast-scaling startups — the accounts most likely to adopt agent frameworks early.

Senior FDE on Databricks' manufacturing deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.