Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs in United States

When the founder of DeepLearning.AI starts hiring FDEs, the archetype has officially arrived. AI Aspire — Andrew Ng's enterprise-AI advisory arm, inside the AI Fund / DeepLearning.AI flywheel — is building its own forward-deployed bench: embed at enterprise clients for 1–3 week engagements to redesign workflows and ship LLM/agent solutions, then build internal tooling from Mountain View between gigs. The JD asks flat-out for Claude Code and Codex fluency. Advisory shop money ($180K–$200K) for the FDE playbook applied to AI transformation.

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.

The clearest sign yet that FDE has escaped software entirely: Picarro is a 65-patent scientific-instruments maker (cavity ring-down spectroscopy for methane and EtO), and its FDE embeds at refineries and chemical plants to make real-time emissions data actually land with Environmental, HSSE, and Operations teams. The tell is the travel band — up to 70% on-site — because the deployment is physical, not a Slack integration. This is the Palantir FDE model rebuilt for smokestacks, and a rare doorway for engineers who know sensor/field data over LLMs.

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.

$310K–$500K at a nonprofit is the plot twist of the week — Jacob Steinhardt and Sarah Schwettmann's eval lab pays frontier-lab money for an FDE whose 'customers' are the EU AI Office and civil-society partners, with privileged-access evaluation exercises run inside frontier labs. Deployment work where the deployment target is AI oversight itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The clearest sign yet that 'Forward Deployed' is becoming a job-title prefix rather than a team: Clearly AI (YC, $8.4M seed, RSAC 2026 Innovation Sandbox top-10) is hiring a Forward Deployed *Security* Engineer to embed its threat-model/privacy-review automation into Fortune 500s like Okta, Rivian, and Affirm. It's the lowest band of this week's cohort and reads GRC-heavy — the wanted skills are STRIDE, DPIA, and TPRM over pure SWE — which is exactly the tell: the FDE model is now being grafted onto security consulting.

A DoD-born agentic-AI startup (partnered with Palantir, Nvidia, HPE, Oracle) hiring an FDE to sit inside classified spaces 80–100% of the week and ship 'app packs' on its platform — explicitly 'not a traditional product or platform engineering role.' It's the Palantir FDE playbook run by Palantir's own partners: TS/SCI + SCI eligibility, US citizens only, $160K–$200K. The tell is the clearance gate — the fastest-growing FDE frontier isn't the AI labs, it's cleared defense work where the deployment literally can't happen remotely.

The company that lit the fuse on generative AI with Stable Diffusion is now staffing FDEs — proof the role has jumped from LLM/enterprise-software land into generative *media*. This seat embeds with creative and enterprise teams (think EA, Universal/Warner Music, WPP) to wire image/video/3D/vector models into real production pipelines: VFX, games, ad, e-commerce. Mid-level bar (4+ yrs), remote US, comp undisclosed — the interesting tell is the skill stack (controllable generation, multi-view consistency, brand-constrained output), not a salary band.

AWS is no longer piloting FDEs — it has stood up a named 'AWS Forward Deployed Engineering' org deep enough to post IC, Senior, Manager and Senior-Manager reqs, plus a dedicated US-Government vertical gated behind TS/SCI-with-poly. When the largest cloud vendor builds a management layer for Forward Deployed Engineers, the function has crossed from experiment to permanent org chart.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Maryland; Virginia; Washington, DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Doppel is one of the first a16z/Bessemer-backed cybersecurity names to stand up a real product-building FDE org — proof the model has jumped past AI labs and data platforms into security. The Series C 'social engineering defense' company scans 150B+ entities a day and wants FDEs fluent in OAuth/SAML/SCIM and SIEM/SOAR wiring, not just LLM glue — a reminder that the highest-leverage FDE seats increasingly sit where enterprise identity plumbing meets agentic AI. Two reqs live (SF + remote US), plus an NYC lead track.

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.

An FDE role that's really a wedge into architecture, engineering & construction — Augrade (a ~32-person team training foundation models that turn 2D blueprints into code-compliant BIM models, cost analysis and docs) wants an FDE who can sit with design firms and productize the messy last mile. $160K–$200K is a real, posted band (no coy 'competitive'), and the domain — BIM, building codes, construction workflows — is about as far from the SaaS-chatbot FDE cliché as this title gets.

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 Austin, Texas 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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Chicago, Illinois 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.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in Remote - Washington DC 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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in San Francisco, California 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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in the US at $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.

One of the rare FDE reqs explicitly open to new grads — Casca (YC, 'AGI for banking') will take a strong new grad into a $100K–$200K FDE seat, a band that itself spans the entire early-career-to-senior spectrum. The work is embedding with banks to deploy an AI-native loan-origination system (agent 'Sarah' runs applicant comms), so you're shipping regulated fintech against 30-year-old legacy cores, not another support bot.

Hardware, not chatbots: Hadrian builds autonomous factories for aerospace and defense, and its FDE embeds on enterprise programs to configure Opus (its factory-autonomy platform), write edge software, and run discovery-to-deployment with no intermediary layer. The $120K–$250K band is unusually wide — it's really two jobs (junior configurator vs. senior program owner) under one title — and one of the few FDE seats where 'production' means physical parts coming off a line.

FDE has officially escaped the AI-native bubble: Tailscale — a WireGuard-based networking company, not an LLM shop — just opened its first FDE seat inside Customer Success. Note the comp tell: $150K–$250K OTE (base + variable tied to sales targets), roughly half the frontier-lab TC and structured like a quota role, a reminder that 'FDE' spans everything from $550K agent-builders to networking CSEs with a fancier title.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team remote in Virginia; Remote - Washington DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

The clearest sign yet that FDE is decoupling from the SWE pedigree: Denari's first FDE hire explicitly waives formal software-engineering experience and instead wants a "resourceful builder" who directs agentic tools like Claude Code. Contrarian on geo too — Madison, WI, hybrid 3 days, not another SF chatbot shop. The kicker is a captive sister firm (Lucida Tax + Accounting) that dogfoods every deploy, so you hear how a solution landed within hours. Reports to the CEO.

While the frontier labs staff FDEs to babysit LLMs, Kognitos is betting the real deployment bottleneck is the boring back office — AP, finance, and IT workflows nobody documented. Its "English as Code" neurosymbolic engine claims to kill hallucinations with deterministic logic, but every customer's tribal knowledge still has to be encoded by hand — that's the FDE's job. PepsiCo and Wipro logos, remote US, mid-level bar (3+ yrs), ~25% travel.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' national security deployment team in the US at $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.

Plain's first FDE — when an API-first support-tooling startup hires a deployment engineer, it's the tell that its customers are now big enough to need custom integration work, not just a signup flow. $180–250K + equity to embed with SF customers.

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.

CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV) is embedding an FDE inside customers' AI teams to ship agents on the W&B Weave toolkit — a $182K–$242K base plus equity is a rare public-company FDE band, and the board's first Weave-observability seat since the Weights & Biases acquisition.

Sequoia-backed Flow (Collison/Helgason/Parrish angels) is hiring one of its first FDEs to take a systems-engineering tool into space, defense and fusion teams — OTE $165K–$230K + equity, and one of the few FDE seats that rewards a hardware/MBSE background over pure software.

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.

Venture-backed defense-tech Picogrid wants an FDE working shoulder-to-shoulder with military customers on TAK/Maven/Lattice and multi-sensor fusion — Secret/TS clearance preferred, $120K–$200K base + significant options. A Fort Bragg seat is about as literally forward-deployed as the title gets.

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.

$85M-funded, third-time founders put an FDE on-site in Chicago to deploy their new AI-pentest product into regulated, on-prem enterprise environments — a rare Heartland FDE seat and the board's cybersecurity-vertical entry point.

Amplitude (4,700 customers, NYSE-listed) is standing up a Customer-FDE org that submits PRs into the core product codebase, not a solutions-eng desk — the FDE model reaching mature public SaaS. Three levels open at once (II / Senior / Staff).

Blitzy deploys thousands of parallel AI agents to compress months of engineering into days; a $160K–$185K FDE is the mid-band seat that embeds with enterprises actually adopting autonomous code generation — the delivery arm of the agentic-dev thesis.

Healthcare-AI startup (SF SoMa, fully in-person) pays $180K–$285K for a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to own customer onboarding and on-site clinical deployments — top-of-band comp for a healthcare-embed seat.

Fintech-for-credit-unions hires a remote, high-ownership FDE — explicitly 'not a support or implementation role' — to build the technical foundation for new AI lending products. Equity-heavy, ship-fast, shape-the-product framing on a full-remote seat.

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.

Investor-backed maritime AI-perception company hiring an on-site FDE in Birmingham, AL ($105K–$132K) — a rare Deep-South seat and the board's first maritime/defense-perception vertical, taking lab AI out onto vessels.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Delaware; Maryland; remote in Pennsylvania; remote in Virginia; remote in Washington DC; West Virginia at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Literally boots-on-the-ground: embed at a customer factory in Dayton to run Machina’s RoboCraftsman robotic sheet-metal-forming cells, tune RoboForming parameters, and debug hardware in production. An FDE role where the ‘deployment’ is a seven-axis robot bending metal, not a SaaS integration — for engineers who want the physical edge of applied AI.

Ground floor of Camunda’s first FDE cohort for ProcessOS — a new product that turns natural-language process descriptions into executable BPMN and self-improves from production data. The mandate is refreshingly concrete: one improving workflow live in 90 days, 3–5 deployed customers in 12 months. A rare chance to define the deployment motion for an agentic-workflow product from zero.

A senior FDE seat at the insurance-AI platform funded by the people behind Salesforce, Veeva and Box. $160K–$200K + equity to stay heavily hands-on (Python/JS/SQL) embedding underwriting-workflow AI — and to own the delivery playbooks a growing FDE pod runs on. Insurance is unglamorous; the deployment surface (portfolio strategy, appetite, triage) is unusually deep.

The FDE seat at a freight-tech rocket: $62M raised ($44M Series B, Sept 2025) to put AI voice ‘workers’ on the phones of brokers and carriers. This is Python-plus-customer-ops, not model research — you wire agents into customer TMS/API stacks and prove ROI on a logistics P&L. One of the few FDE roles where ‘production’ means a load actually moves.

The FDE playbook pointed inward: a nuclear-reactor builder hiring a ‘forward deployed’ engineer whose customer isn’t an enterprise account but its own engineering, manufacturing, and regulatory teams — embedding agentic AI into the in-house APEX platform to compress reactor deployment timelines. $195K–$220K for 15+ yrs; one of the few FDE seats where shipping fast is a nuclear-safety problem, not a SaaS metric.

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.

Machinify's AI payment-integrity platform touches 270M+ lives across 85+ health plans, including many of the top 20 — and it's hiring FDEs to embed with payers and build on top of it. A rare FDE seat where the deployment surface is the US healthcare claims system itself.

The Kafka-alternative streaming vendor stood up a full FDE org — 'the delivery arm,' reporting to a Head of FDE — to embed builders inside customer codebases on its new Agentic Data Plane. $194K–$229K base, 30–50% travel, and a JD that explicitly benchmarks itself against Palantir FDSE, OpenAI Deployed Engineer and Sierra: infra vendors now copy the labs' field model wholesale.

Sixfold's AI agents underwrite billions in premium for the world's largest carriers — and its Senior FDE JD is unusually blunt about wanting Claude Code / Codex-native engineers who orchestrate parallel agents and live in evals and context engineering. A field role that assumes agentic tooling is your default workflow, not a nice-to-have.

The CX-software incumbent is paying $200K–$300K OTE for FDEs to embed with strategic customers and ship its AI Agents and RAG workflows into production. 'Part software engineer, part strategic consultant,' 25–50% travel — about the clearest sign yet that the title is table stakes for public SaaS, not just frontier labs.

A 25-year-old analytics vendor posting a $300K FDE ceiling — that band tops most frontier-lab IC floors. Alteryx One rebrands the desktop-workflow company as an AI-data-architecture shop, and the senior, remote-US FDE is the wedge into Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery accounts.

Jira and Confluence's owner — 300K+ customers — now runs a Principal-tier FDE org for its AI push, with SF, a Seattle Senior Principal req, and a fully-remote AI variant all live at once. $206K–$269K to embed enterprise-scale agent deployments: proof the title has landed at the collaboration-software incumbent, not just the labs.

Cognition is standing up a dedicated Federal group around Devin — a foundational Deployed Engineer seat in DC, prior government experience required. The ~$26B autonomous-coding leader building a cleared delivery arm is the clearest tell yet that even Devin's last mile into government is human. Base band reads modest ($95K–$132K); the equity and the ground-floor federal scope are the case.

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.

IBM — 114 years old — now posts 'Forward Deploy Engineer' reqs at $144K–$268K. When Big Blue adopts the title, the role has fully crossed from frontier labs into legacy enterprise. Multiple US reqs (Raleigh, Durham) live, from entry level up.

LangChain calls it 'Deployed Engineer,' not FDE — but it's the same seat: embedding with customers to get agents into production on LangGraph and LangSmith. The framework half the industry prototypes on is now selling the last mile itself. $170K–$190K, Austin with remote flex.

An FDE seat for autonomous science: embed with materials-science and chemistry teams running Lila's 'AI Science Factory.' Flagship Pioneering-backed, and the level-flexible posting means they'll hire the right generalist at any seniority. Proof the FDE motion has jumped from software into the physical lab.

Wealth management is quietly one of the stickiest FDE verticals — the data is messy, the clients are demanding, and nobody re-platforms twice. Addepar, sitting under trillions in tracked assets, is now hiring a remote-US FDE to push its platform deeper into RIA and family-office workflows. $107K–$168K base before equity.

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.

TurboTax's parent wants FDEs to move customers from 'AI pilot' to 'AI in the general ledger.' Intuit Enterprise Suite is hiring embedded engineers at $202.5K–$274K base — a trillion-dollar-adjacent public fintech matching startup FDE comp to own the last mile of accounting automation. The band alone says they're serious.

When the database layer starts hiring FDEs, the pattern is officially infrastructure-wide. MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) just stood up a Forward Deployed Engineering org from scratch — Atlas plus AI app-modernization — spanning seven-plus geos on two continents. IC band $118K–$231K, Senior Staff reaching ~$297K.

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.

The founding-FDE pattern keeps compressing. Clera's first non-founder hire is a deployment engineer — employee #1 at a seed-stage shop building conversational agents that run automated B2B product demos, brought on before there's a product team to hand off to. $100K–$200K + founding equity, open to 0–3 yrs. Seed companies now hire the last-mile person before the platform is even finished.

The FDE model reaches hard-tech. Sift — built by SpaceX, Palantir, and Google alumni out of Dragon/Falcon/Starlink telemetry work — embeds engineers to wire its high-frequency observability platform into rockets, drones, and autonomous machines. $150K–$200K + equity, in-office twice a week. Proof the deployment role isn't only SaaS chat agents: it's moving to physical AI, exactly where TechCrunch says FDE demand shifts next.

Craig McLuckie — who co-created Kubernetes — is putting a Staff FDE at the center of Stacklok's enterprise motion: the person who invented the platform still needs someone embedded to land it in customers. $200K–$300K employer-provided, Go/RBAC, upstream fixes expected. When even that infra pedigree hires an “in-region anchor” for the last mile, it says the deployment gap doesn't care how good your platform is.

The FDE role just grew an entry rung. Wipro (230K employees) is hiring “Junior FDEs” straight out of school at $68,420–$78,950, with a published ladder: Junior FDE → FDE → Senior/Architect. The frontier-lab version of this title clears $400K+; the services version starts at a sixth of that. Same two words, ~6x comp spread — the clearest sign yet that “FDE” has split into two separate labor markets.

Proof the FDE motion is leaving software for the physical economy: ex-Samsara engineers pointing agentic AI at trucking back-offices — load coordination, dispatch, driver support — and already autonomously handling ~70% of tasks in production at major US fleets. First FDE hire, ~25% travel to carrier sites, owning the technical close. The unglamorous ROI (call-resolution rate, CSAT, time saved) is exactly why it's a high-agency seat.

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.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Berkeley, California; California; Los Angeles, California; San Diego, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

One of the only FDE roles that openly hires new grads — 1+ years, $120K–$180K, and visa sponsorship — where the labs all gate at 5+. If you want the title on your résumé, this is the cheapest ticket in.

The board's first *internal* FDE: Unity isn't deploying to customers — it's embedding an engineer inside its own Finance, Legal, Marketing, and Ops teams to replace manual work with agents, at $228K–$342K employer-provided. The title escaping GTM and turning inward is the signal to watch.

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.

A freight-logistics AI startup standing up its FIRST forward-deployed team — and the bar is just 1–5 years. A rare junior-friendly founding FDE seat, in a vertical (3PL, brokerage, carrier ops) almost nobody else on this board is hiring for. Not to be confused with Augment Code, the AI-coding company.

A Fortune 500 commercial-real-estate firm posting a Staff FDE at $150K–$280K — the clearest sign yet the title has jumped the tech fence, sitting alongside Seaboard Foods and Bilt on this board. Embedded engineering has officially reached the property-management world.

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.

Bland's AI voice agents answer real phone calls for some of the world's largest companies — and the FDE owns the build from discovery call to deployment, including on-site training dinners with the champions. Unusually high-touch for a $65M Series B; first month is full-time in the Jackson Square office, then customer sites.

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.

The campus-recruiting company quietly built 'the fastest-growing AI data business in history' in 2025 — Handshake AI FDEs sit across the table from frontier-lab researchers building evals and benchmarks. A direct Scale/Surge competitor hiring FDEs at both I and Senior levels.

A ground-station startup rebuilding earth-to-space connectivity puts the FDE title on classified mission work — $200K employer-provided in DC, 7+ years of mission-ops and capture-engineering experience. Proof the deployment role has reached space and national-security infrastructure, not just SaaS.

$255K–$351K — one of the top bands on the board this week — for a Staff/Principal FDE at DiDi's Silicon Valley lab, which works on AI security and intelligent-driving tech. A rare mobility/AV deployment seat, and a sign the FDE title has fully crossed from enterprise SaaS into hardware-adjacent autonomy.

The company that sold you IntelliJ now wants an FDE to push 'JetBrains Central' into enterprises — $204K–$306K, fully remote, explicitly targeting ex-Staff/Principal engineers, Heads of Eng, and CTOs. When a 20-year IDE vendor stands up forward deployment for AI governance, the land grab has gone mainstream.

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.

300+ banks and fintechs across 70 countries, $145M from a16z, Visa, and Experian — Sardine wants an FDE to train custom fraud-fighting agents inside client environments and prove causal impact with its own eval pipelines. Fincrime is quietly one of the densest FDE verticals nobody puts on a slide.

The incumbent conceding the wedge: Talkdesk is a Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant Leader, yet it's standing up a full FDE ladder — Staff, Senior, and Principal seats live at once — to defend contact-center AI against the startups (Cresta, Decagon) attacking from below. Principal base is $230K–$275K employer-provided, agentic-AI and multi-agent RAG at the center of the JD. When the category leader decides deployment is the moat, the last mile just got contested.

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in the US at $153K–$210K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in the Central US at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Austin, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Chicago, Illinois at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Dallas, Texas at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Denver, Colorado at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in Remote - California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

Senior FDE on Databricks' retail deployment team in the Northeast & Southeast US at a transparent $182K–$250K. Retail FDE seats target demand-forecasting and personalization workloads — Databricks is building a named retail deployment bench.

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.

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.

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.

$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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An AI-security startup (from CMU's Zico Kolter and Andy Zou) at ~25 people is already standing up forward deployment — building real-time threat detection and adaptive defenses inside customer environments. FDE-as-security is a niche the big deployment shops don't touch.

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.

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.

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."

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.'

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Neha Narkhede's (Confluent co-founder) AI Risk Decisioning company calls the FDE 'the most technically complete role at Oscilar' — embedding engineers to design agentic fraud, credit, and compliance systems inside banks and fintechs. Founder pedigree plus a fully-remote seat.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 'Founding' Forward Deployed ML Engineer at a young lab hiring across SF, Singapore, and India at once — founding scope on the customer-facing edge, where you 'operate at the bleeding edge of our technology and our customers' most consequential problems simultaneously.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 robotics-automation startup building its FDE bench three postings deep — Robotics, Vision & ML, and an Edge-Frameworks/FDE-tooling seat — at $160K–$200K + equity to deploy FactoryOS on real factory floors. This is the corner of the market where 'forward deployed' means a hard hat, not a Zoom call.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

$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 rare FDE that's hands-on-hardware: you're the first responder for a live robot fleet at one of the hottest robotics foundation-model labs, not embedding at a customer. Asks just 2 years and a B.S. — because almost nobody has actually debugged multi-robot fleets in production.

Groq literally frames the job as 'a hands-on AI startup CTO' — deploy and optimize inference on their LPU stack inside customer orgs, up to 50% travel. $143,600–$289,100, and one of the few FDE seats on the chip side of the inference war rather than the model side.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Baseten is hiring the FDE manager and the ICs simultaneously — join the org on day zero, or run it.

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.

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.

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.

A top-5 pharma is standing up a three-level FDE org — Exec Director, Director, and IC postings live simultaneously. The clearest signal yet that the title has escaped tech.

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.

Replit is hiring someone to build its FDE org from zero at $300–400K — proof the role now has a management track, not just an IC ceiling.

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

Nvidia pays like a lab for the architect flavor — and every serious enterprise GPU deployment eventually routes through this team.

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

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.

A ~60-year-old payments and banking-core giant is standing up an AI-native FDE practice — a Principal seat plus a second, standard FDE req live at the same time. When FIS embeds engineers to ship LLM agents into bank back offices, the title has officially reached the Fortune 500.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Mid/Senior FDE on Databricks' deployment team in the US at $153K–$210K. Part of the largest forward-deployed engineering org outside Palantir — Databricks now runs FDE across dozens of geos and verticals simultaneously.

Senior FDE on Databricks' digital native deployment team in Mountain View, California; San Francisco, California at a transparent $182K–$250K. Digital-native / emerging-enterprise FDE seats target fast-scaling startups — the accounts most likely to adopt agent frameworks early.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Virginia at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Senior FDE on Databricks' public sector deployment team in Maryland at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

Senior FDE on Databricks' healthcare deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts 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' healthcare deployment team in Chicago, Illinois 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' healthcare deployment team in Dallas, Texas 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' healthcare deployment team in Austin, Texas 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' healthcare deployment team in Atlanta, Georgia 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' healthcare deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 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' media deployment team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 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' manufacturing deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts at a transparent $182K–$250K. Manufacturing FDE roles push GenAI into industrial and supply-chain data — an underserved vertical Databricks is now naming explicitly.

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

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

Senior FDE on Databricks' media deployment team in San Francisco, California 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' media deployment team in Los Angeles, California 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' media deployment team in Seattle, Washington 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' media deployment team in Dallas, Texas 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' media deployment team in Austin, Texas 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' media deployment team in Chicago, Illinois 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' media deployment team in Boston, Massachusetts 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' 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' media deployment team in Atlanta, Georgia 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' media deployment team in Washington, DC 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' media deployment team in Denver, Colorado 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' media deployment team in Mountain View, California 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' media deployment team in Raleigh, North Carolina 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' public sector deployment team in Washington, DC at a transparent $182K–$250K. Public-sector FDE work is the federal/gov land-grab — Databricks is carving out a dedicated, often clearance-gated track alongside AWS, Scale, and Cognition.

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.