Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs in San Francisco

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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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