2026-06-22
Forward-Deployed Engineer is the hottest role in AI right now. I track every opening across 367 companies — here's what the data shows
852 open FDE roles. 367 companies. Median $193k USD. We scraped public ATS feeds directly — here's the full data breakdown.
The title "Forward-Deployed Engineer" didn't exist five years ago. Palantir invented it. Today it's on the careers pages of OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic, Mistral, and hundreds of AI companies you've never heard of — and the demand isn't slowing down.
I've been watching the FDE hiring market for the past month. Data is scraped daily directly from company ATS feeds — no middlemen, no stale listings. Here's what I found.
What is a Forward-Deployed Engineer?
If you haven't run into the title yet: an FDE is an engineer who goes on-site (or deep on Slack) with a specific customer and makes the product actually work in that customer's real environment. Part software engineer, part solutions architect, part trusted technical advisor. Post-sale, hands-on, code-shipping.
Palantir built its entire service model around this role. Then came the AI era, and suddenly every company selling an AI platform faces the same problem: demos work, production is hard. Getting a general-purpose model or platform to function reliably against a specific customer's messy data, legacy systems, and workflows — that's the FDE's job.
The role has jumped from a Palantir quirk to a category. And the hiring data reflects it.
The data: 852 open FDE roles, 367 companies, as of today
I've built latchhire.com/board/fde — a job board that scrapes public ATS feeds daily and surfaces only FDE roles. No manual curation. No LinkedIn markup inflation. Direct from the source.
Here's the full snapshot, pulled this morning, June 22, 09:15 UTC:
852 active FDE roles across 367 companies.
That's not a niche title anymore. That's a market.
Who's hiring most aggressively
| Company | Open FDE roles |
|---|---|
| Palantir | 58 |
| Databricks | 44 |
| OpenAI | 34 |
| HappyRobot | 19 |
| Mistral | 15 |
| Cohere | 10 |
| Cresta | 10 |
Palantir at the top is expected — they invented the role and still hire FDEs at scale globally. Databricks at #2 is interesting: the data/AI platform space is doubling down on customer-embedded engineers as enterprise adoption of AI infrastructure accelerates. HappyRobot at #3 is the surprise — a logistics-AI startup that's apparently growing fast enough to need nearly 20 FDEs in parallel.
The rest of the top-10 reads like the who's-who of the AI infrastructure layer: foundation model labs (Mistral), enterprise AI platforms (Cohere, Cresta). The pattern is consistent — companies selling AI platforms to enterprises need engineers who can make those platforms land in production. That's the FDE.
What they pay
Of the 852 open roles, 340 (42.7%) have a salary range published in the original posting. Among those:
- Median: $193,100/year USD
- 25th percentile: $160,000
- 75th percentile: $220,000
The spread is wide but the floor is high. Entry to the role at most companies starts somewhere around $150k–$160k total comp; senior FDE roles at top AI labs land at $220k–$300k+, often with meaningful equity. This is an engineering role with a sales-cycle exposure — companies pay for the customer-facing risk and the travel.
The 42.7% salary coverage reflects a real shift in transparency norms in tech hiring, particularly at VC-backed AI companies where salary ranges are increasingly posted by default. The remaining ~57% either don't disclose (common for international roles) or hide compensation inside the application process.
Remote vs. office
| Work mode | Count |
|---|---|
| Hybrid | 215 (25%) |
| Remote | 189 (22%) |
| On-site | 187 (22%) |
| Not specified | 261 (31%) |
This is the most interesting breakdown. The FDE role is famously associated with travel and customer site presence — yet 22% of open roles are listed as fully remote, and another 25% as hybrid. The "on-site" category at 22% skews toward roles at larger companies with specific customer locations.
The 31% unspecified suggests many companies are deliberately leaving this ambiguous in the job description (often because the answer is "it depends on the customer"). If you're applying to FDE roles and flexibility matters to you, this number warrants a direct question at the screening stage.
Geography: where the roles are
The roles concentrate in the usual US tech hubs — San Francisco (53 roles), New York (47) — with a meaningful London cluster (33) that reflects the maturation of AI hiring in Europe. The "Remote" location tag (38 roles) understates the actual remote-available pool given the 189 classified as remote above.
One notable absence: very few FDE roles appear in Austin, Seattle, or Chicago — cities with large software engineering talent pools. The FDE market is still concentrated at the coasts and in London, likely because the enterprise customers these engineers serve are clustered there.
Freshness: 61 new roles in the last 7 days
The market isn't cooling. 61 new FDE roles appeared in the past week across the 367 companies I track. That's roughly 9 new FDE openings per day, from a pool that was already 852 roles deep.
What this tells us about the FDE market
A few takeaways from the data that I don't see discussed elsewhere:
1. The role has escaped Palantir. Palantir still has the most open FDE roles, but they're 6.8% of the total. 94% of open FDE roles are at companies other than Palantir. This is no longer a Palantir title.
2. AI infrastructure companies are the primary demand center. The top-10 companies are almost entirely AI platform / foundation model companies. The FDE role is the enterprise deployment layer for the AI era — the missing piece between "we have a great model" and "the customer's actually using it in production."
3. Salary transparency is above average for tech. 42.7% of FDE postings include salary. For comparison, industry surveys suggest ~30-35% of tech job postings disclose compensation. AI-era companies trend higher on transparency, and FDE roles specifically tend to disclose because the comp is a selling point for candidates being asked to travel and take on customer-facing risk.
4. Hybrid is the dominant mode, but the picture is murky. The 31% "unspecified" category likely hides a lot of "customer-site-dependent" roles. If you're optimizing for remote, filter explicitly — but know that many FDE roles involve bursts of travel regardless of the listed mode.
The board
latchhire.com/board/fde — updated daily from ATS feeds. Every role links directly to the original posting on the company's ATS. No middleman. No apply-through-us friction.
Filter by remote type, search by company or keyword. Salary shown where the posting includes it.
If you want new FDE roles delivered weekly: get email alerts → (form at the top of the board). No spam, one digest per week, unsubscribe any time.
If you're an engineering recruiter or a company with open FDE roles: your jobs are probably already on the board. Drop me a line if you want to discuss featured visibility.
Data pulled 2026-06-22 09:15 UTC. Active roles only. Salary figures USD-only; international roles in other currencies excluded from the median calculation. "New in 7d" = first seen in the past 7 days.