FDE Jobs: Forward Deployed Engineer Openings, Pay & How to Apply

FDE jobs are Forward Deployed Engineer roles, where engineers embed with a vendor's customers to build integrations, write production code, and get a product working inside the customer's environment. We track open FDE postings at OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Ramp, Databricks, and 50+ other companies, plus the salary data behind each one. Postings grew roughly 800% over the past year. Browse the live board above, or read on for pay, the AI variant, and how applications work.

FDE jobs in 2026 (and what changed since 2025)

The 2025-to-2026 shift is the rise of the AI variant. In 2025 most FDE postings were enterprise SaaS deployment work. Heading into 2026, roughly 30% to 50% of FDE listings at AI labs now ask for LLM integration experience, retrieval-augmented generation, or model evaluation. Salesforce alone has stated a target near 1,000 FDEs to staff Agentforce deployments. The companies adding headcount fastest are OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, and the YC-backed startups building agent products.

FDE jobs salary

Base-plus-bonus compensation for Forward Deployed Engineers usually lands between $130,000 and $300,000, and senior packages at AI labs reach $400,000 to $500,000 once equity is counted. Pay tracks company stage and seniority more than location. Here is a quick read by company, with full cited breakdowns on each salary page:

Full breakdowns, including Google and the per-company numbers readers ask about most, live on the salary page. For the underlying study, see our FDE Salary Report 2026.

FDE AI jobs

An AI FDE does the same embedding work, but the deliverable is a deployed model rather than a generic integration. Day to day that means building RAG systems over a customer's proprietary documents, wiring up agent workflows that call internal tools, and running evaluations to catch hallucinations before they reach production. These roles pay roughly 10% to 20% above non-AI FDE work at the same seniority because the candidate pool is small. If you can already deploy LLMs in production and talk to customers, you are rare.

How to apply for FDE jobs

Forward Deployed Engineer roles are applied to online, through each company's careers site or an aggregator like this board. There is no paper advertisement and no fixed last date. Postings open and close as teams hire. The fastest path from "I want an FDE job" to a first interview is six concrete steps:

1. Filter the live board. Use the filters above to narrow by company stage, industry, remote status, and seniority. Most candidates do best applying to 5 to 10 well-matched openings per week, not 30 generic ones.
2. Click through to the company's careers page. Every listing here links directly to the employer's official posting on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, or the company's own ATS. Apply on the company site so your application lands inside the hiring team's pipeline, not in a recruiter middleman's queue.
3. Tailor your resume to the role. An FDE resume needs to prove both production engineering and customer-facing work in the same bullet points. Lead with the technologies in the posting and follow with the customer-facing outcome. See the FDE resume guide for the full template.
4. Skip the cover letter unless they explicitly require one. Most FDE hiring teams do not read them. If the application requires one, keep it to three short paragraphs: why this company, one concrete example of FDE-style work you have done, and what you want to learn here.
5. Reach out to a current FDE on LinkedIn. A 60-second message to an FDE who already works at the company, asking one specific question about their work, often surfaces a referral. Referrals materially improve interview rates and skip ATS filtering.
6. Prepare for the FDE-specific interview loop. Recruiter screen, technical phone screen, coding round, system design or integration round, and a customer scenario round. The customer scenario is the differentiator and the round most candidates underprepare for. The FDE interview guide covers each round.

Applications usually move from submission to a recruiter screen within 5 to 10 business days at well-staffed companies (Salesforce, Google, Palantir) and 1 to 3 weeks at smaller startups. If you have not heard back in three weeks, the role is either filled or your application stalled. Move on and apply to the next match. Do not chase, and do not re-apply to the same posting.

Two phrasing notes for searches that land on this page. "Apply online" for FDE jobs always means the company's careers site or an ATS link from a board like this one. "Last date" for FDE jobs does not apply, US tech postings stay open until they are filled, with no cutoff. Government FDE clerk recruitment in India does work on a last-date schedule, but that is a different role with a different career site.

Remote FDE jobs

A good share of FDE roles are remote-friendly, though many still expect travel to customer sites for kickoffs and on-site deployments. Remote-eligible postings cluster at companies with distributed customers, while roles tied to a single large account or a security-sensitive industry tend to be on-site. Browse remote FDE jobs, or filter the board above by location to see which openings are remote right now.

Frequently asked questions about FDE jobs