Browse by role type
The forward-deployed title has splintered. Here's every variant on the board — from the classic FDE to the newer 'Deployed Engineer' framing.
The core FDE role: engineers who embed with customers to take a product from pilot to production. The canonical title, and still the bulk of the market.
The performance-engineering corner of the role: GPU-level inference optimization, serving, and training work embedded with customers and labs.
Manager, Head, Director, and VP seats — proof the function now has a management track. Often the person hired to build an FDE org from zero.
Hands-on-hardware forward deployment: fleet ops, on-site diagnostics, and integration work at robotics and embodied-AI companies.
The same job with the 'Forward' dropped — increasingly common as companies like Cognition brand their embedded-engineering teams simply 'Deployed Engineers.'
The architect flavor: senior, design-led deployment work owning solution architecture across a customer’s stack. Tends to pay a tier above the IC band.