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 FDE jobs applications work (apply online)

Forward Deployed Engineer roles are applied to online, through each company's careers site or a job board, not through a paper advertisement with a fixed last date. There is no single application window. Postings open and close as teams hire. The usual loop is a recruiter screen, a technical phone screen, a take-home or live coding round, a system-design or integration round, and a customer-facing or behavioral round that tests how you handle ambiguity in front of a client. A practical path: find a live posting on the board above, apply directly on the company site, and tailor your resume to show production code plus customer outcomes. See the FDE interview guide for the full loop.

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