Applied Compute
Forward Deployed Engineer
Why it's interesting
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.
The role
Embed with enterprise customers (early adopters include Cognition, DoorDash, Mercor) training and deploying custom models and agents on Applied Compute's in-house training stack. The whole company is built around forward deployment — FDEs are the core delivery mechanism, not an add-on. Sourced via the Plank FDE census (CC BY 4.0).
Applications go directly to the company. We curate; we don't broker.