Forward Deployed Engineer jobs

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

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

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

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

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.

Mira Murati's lab pays lab-tier comp for the team customers actually meet — fine-tuning as the wedge, FDEs as the delivery mechanism.

The Pentagon borrowed Palantir's job title and made it a GS-14 pay grade — FDEs embedding 'all the way down to the unit level.' Applications close July 17.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

$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.

The company running Anthropic's $50B compute buildout pays $150K–$275K for an FDE who deploys inward, not outward — no customers, just their own gigawatt-scale stack. The clearest sign yet the title now means 'engineer with maximum autonomy.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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