Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs in New York

The $140K spread is the whole story: a Series B voice-AI startup ($1B valuation, $125M raised, 10x in 2025) is willing to pay founding-engineer money for someone who embeds with home-services brands, owns the build end-to-end, and lets what they learn in the field steer the core roadmap. Note the title — Forward Deployed *Product* Engineer — Avoca is explicitly wiring the deployment loop back into product, not treating it as post-sale glue. Next.js/Node/Postgres/AWS stack, NYC-in-office, in a $1T market where 85% of missed calls go to a competitor.

FDE escapes the usual sales-adjacent orbit and lands inside Trust & Safety. Cinder (Accel + YC) sells the command center that the world's largest platforms use to write policy, deploy anti-abuse agents in real time, and file NCMEC reports — and its FDEs embed with customers' T&S, engineering, and policy teams as implementer *and* strategic advisor. Explicitly not a quota-carrying role. A rare mission-heavy FDE for engineers who'd rather fight fraud and abuse at platform scale than wire up another dashboard.

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.

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.

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.

Ground floor of OpenAI's billion-dollar FDE venture announced in May — the highest-leverage deployment seat in the industry.

The successor to Lovable's founding FDE seat: a player-coach lead who builds and runs the FDE team in their location while staying hands-on. One of a small group of FDE leaders defining how the function scales globally at a company with 60M+ projects built and enterprise logos like Adidas and Zendesk.

Senior FDE on Databricks' national security deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts; Delaware; Maryland; remote in California; remote in New York; remote in Washington DC; Virginia; West Virginia at a transparent $182K–$250K. A clearance-track national-security FDE seat — the highest-margin, least salary-transparent corner of deployment work, and Databricks is now openly staffing it.

A rare cleared FDE seat that isn't at Palantir — you build on top of Foundry, AIP and Maven Smart System as the prime's integration muscle, inside classification constraints, not around them. The TS/SCI + US-citizenship gate is exactly why base opens at $220K–$280K: the clearance is scarcer than the React/Node stack. NEA/a16z/Accel-backed govtech ($35M raised) now claiming 55M residents across 50+ agencies and pushing hard into federal.

The 'founding FDE' title finally lands at a proposal-writing AI shop — AutogenAI (generative AI for bids and grant/proposal writing) is standing up its US forward-deployed function from scratch, and the fine print is the tell: US citizenship, background check, and a spot on the federal on-call rota alongside DevSecOps. It's a $180K–$200K bet that the FDE model travels into the unglamorous-but-sticky world of government procurement, not just frontier-lab demos.

Rare FDE seat where the deployment site is a military installation and the product is a mobile carrier's own network core — Cape (privacy-first carrier, Series C closed March 2026) wants an FDE to embed with federal customers, write production glue against live cellular infrastructure, and turn pilots into programs of record. The $175K–$235K band is honest for a role that also demands a TS clearance and a flag-officer-to-git-ticket communication range; it's Anduril/Palantir deployment work without the household name.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

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.

A $170–300K band is striking for a $7M seed-stage shop — August (NEA-backed legal AI for midsize + AmLaw-150 firms) is paying near-frontier money to put an FDE onsite with law firms, betting that white-glove deployment, not model quality, wins legal AI. All-onsite NYC, no remote hedge.

Series-B Adonis ($31M) runs an AI orchestration platform for healthcare payments — its Senior FDE leads on-site discovery at major health systems and writes production code against Epic and Athena EHRs. $190K–$210K + equity for an FDE that lives inside hospital revenue-cycle guts.

YC-backed Luminai automates org-wide long-form workflows for healthcare, finance and telecom — and is hiring an FDE Team Lead at $190K–$270K, a management-track FDE role that's still uncommon on the board. Field-driven product direction with real P&L-adjacent leverage.

Series-C PhysicsX (London HQ) takes its AI-for-physics platform into aerospace, defense, semis and automotive customers — FDSEs travel to customer sites 3–4 weeks a quarter across four continents. $180K–$250K base + equity, and a rare FDE seat that rewards deep simulation/ML over SaaS integration.

An 'internal' FDE: Upside's customer is its own GTM org, not an outside account — you own the platform its merchant-marketing teams run on. $214–245K employer-provided, and proof the FDE title is migrating out of AI startups into profitable retail-media marketplaces.

Women-led finance-data platform (founders ex-WeWork/WaPo data leaders) hiring an FDE for Finance Solutions in NYC — reconciliation and clean reporting without ripping out the ERP, a classic embed-and-automate FDE beachhead.

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.

YC agent-workflow startup wants a full-stack FDE ($150K–$200K + up to 0.3%) who travels to client sites and writes the code no one's written before; finance/PE exposure preferred — the 'technical tip of the spear' framing in its purest form.

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.

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.

Another megabank makes FDE a Director-level seat: Citi wants someone to re-engineer core processes with its in-house AI agents and 'apprentice future experts' inside a 219,000-person institution. Joins BNY, Barclays, and FIS in proving Wall Street now hires FDEs by title, not just by function — and the $170K–$300K band is real, employer-posted, not a Glassdoor estimate.

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.

Every lab is racing to embed in the Fortune 500; Concourse is putting FDEs in the layer nobody's pricing — the 85+ federal, state, and local agencies still running essential services on systems older than the internet. NYC on-site, $100K–$200K employer-provided, shipping AI into the Hawaii State Judiciary and the LA City Council. Govtech is the FDE frontier hiding in plain sight.

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.

The Palantir Foundry core team — the people who built Ontology, Fusion, and Workshop — left to sell the FDE motion back to finance, and they're paying $200K–$280K employer-provided for it. The bet: the model is the commodity, the verifiable 'trust layer' harness is the product. If it's right, this is the highest-leverage seat on the board.

A Prime Defense Contractor selling an 'AI workforce' for intelligence and cyber work — Accrete's FDEs deploy agents into government and enterprise at software economics, not labor. The census lists it hiring two FDE variants deep, including a PhD-required prompt seat.

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.

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.

Norm calls it a 'Legal Engineer,' not an FDE — a lawyer who ships and supervises AI compliance agents. $175K–$225K to embed with clients managing $30T in assets, on $140M+ backed by Blackstone, Bain, Vanguard, Citi, and Marc Benioff. Proof the FDE model is escaping software and colonizing the professions.

A 240-year-old custody bank now runs a formal 'FDE playbook' and an Engineering Hub team hiring at SVP level — the clearest sign yet that forward deployment has escaped tech and landed in Wall Street back-office infrastructure.

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.

The cloud-native core-banking platform out to kill banks' legacy mainframes makes FDEs its 'primary technical interface with the client' — embedding them inside bank engineering teams to ship Vault into production. Deployment is the wedge for replacing 40-year-old COBOL.

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.

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.

$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.

A YC-backed decision engine for banks and fintechs staffing FDEs three levels deep — entry-level through Lead at $200K–$300K — across NYC, Berlin, and London. One of the few FDE ladders anywhere with real German-market seats.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

$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 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.'

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' financial services deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Financial-services FDE work is where Databricks' lakehouse plus governance story sells hardest — regulated data, high scrutiny, big budgets.

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

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

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Databricks is one of the only shops staffing dedicated FDEs against media, entertainment & gaming accounts — data-heavy customers with real GenAI appetite.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Healthcare & life-sciences FDE seats mean HIPAA-grade deployments and clinical/biopharma data — a vertical few FDE orgs staff this deliberately.

Senior FDE on Databricks' manufacturing deployment team in New York City, New York at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.