FDE Jobs: Forward Deployed Engineer Openings

FDE Pulse tracks 1218 live Forward Deployed Engineer roles, with most openings aimed at mid-level engineers. Remote work exists but remains limited. Disclosed salaries run from $44K to $468K, while the disclosed median base sits at $188K. The board is updated weekly.

FDE Pulse tracks 1218 live Forward Deployed Engineer roles across companies building software that has to work in the messy reality of customer environments, rather than only inside a polished product demo.

The market pays well, but it asks for a particular kind of engineer. You need enough technical depth to build and debug. You also need enough commercial instinct to understand why a customer is stuck, what they need next, and when a product problem is about to become a relationship problem.

The live jobs board is updated weekly. Use it to find openings, filter by location and seniority, and see where companies are putting real hiring budget behind forward deployed engineering.

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.

One quick disambiguation. Some searches for "fde jobs advertisement," "fde jobs online apply," or "fde jobs last date" are looking for government clerical recruitment in India, where FDE can mean a data-entry clerk grade. FDE Pulse does not cover those. This site is about Forward Deployed Engineer software roles in the US and remote tech market.

What Is an FDE Job?

A forward deployed engineer works close to customers, applying engineering skill to implementation, integration, deployment, and the product problems uncovered when software meets a real operating environment.

The title varies by company. The work usually does not. An FDE may build an integration, investigate a deployment failure, shape a technical proof of concept, or turn a repeated customer request into a product requirement the core engineering team can use.

That puts the role somewhere between software engineering, solutions architecture, and product feedback. The mix changes by employer. Some teams expect FDEs to write substantial production code. Others lean harder on technical delivery and customer-facing problem solving. The useful question in an interview is what an FDE owns after the first customer meeting ends.

The best roles give engineers proximity to decisions that are usually hidden behind product managers, account teams, and long feedback loops. You see the gap between what the product promises and what customers can get done on Monday morning. That can make the work unusually satisfying. It can also make it unusually chaotic.

FDE jobs fit engineers who enjoy ambiguity with an expiration date. The customer has a problem. The team needs an answer. The work starts there.

How Many FDE Jobs Are Open Right Now?

FDE Pulse tracks 1218 live Forward Deployed Engineer roles. That is a broad enough market to reward specificity in your search.

A generic application can land in the same pile as every other engineer who saw an interesting title and clicked apply. A better approach is to identify the version of forward deployed work you want: enterprise implementations, AI deployments, data infrastructure, regulated industries, developer tools, or a role that stays closer to core product engineering.

The board tracks openings from 726 companies currently hiring FDEs. Those companies are not all hiring for the same job, even when they use the same title.

A large platform company may need someone who can navigate a long implementation cycle and several stakeholder groups. A smaller company may need an engineer who can walk into a customer account, build the missing piece, and bring the learning back to a product team that is still deciding what the product should become.

That difference should shape how you evaluate job descriptions. Look for language about deployment ownership, integrations, travel, customer meetings, technical discovery, feedback into product, and production support. Those details tell you more than title inflation ever will.

The FDE role can be a route into product leadership, technical go-to-market, staff engineering, or founding work. It can also become a career where you spend too much time absorbing every rough edge in a product organization. The line between those outcomes is usually set by scope, staffing, and whether the company treats customer work as learning or as a permanent patch layer.

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 Salary Expectations

FDE Pulse salary data shows a $44K to $468K full disclosed salary range, from 168 of 1218 tracked roles. That spread reflects how wide the title has become.

Some jobs sit closer to early-career technical delivery. Others compete directly for engineers who can own difficult deployments, work with senior customer teams, and make product-level technical judgments without much supervision.

FDE Pulse salary data puts the median base at $188K and the average base at $192K for disclosed FDE salaries. Those figures are useful directional anchors, not a substitute for reading the role in front of you.

Base pay rarely captures the full trade. Equity, variable compensation, travel expectations, on-call responsibility, customer intensity, and the amount of custom work expected all change the economics. A role with a strong base can still be a bad deal if the company expects one person to absorb every escalation from a strategic account.

FDE Pulse salary data shows that 14% of tracked roles disclose salary. The remainder leaves room for companies to avoid the useful part of the conversation until late in the process.

The right time to ask about compensation is early enough to avoid wasted interviews and late enough to understand what the company is buying. Are they hiring a customer-facing engineer? A technical account owner? A product-minded builder? A firefighter with a laptop and a calendar full of customer calls?

Those jobs deserve different compensation, even if the title stays the same.

For a closer look at disclosed ranges and how employers structure pay, browse the FDE salary data. It is a better starting point than assuming every forward deployed role pays like the most visible AI-company opening on your feed.

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:

Company	Typical FDE base	Notes
OpenAI	$162K–$325K	Posted bands; equity can push total past $500K
Palantir	$135K–$238K	FDSE track hires new grads; ~$215K median total
Salesforce	$150K–$248K	Scaling Agentforce deployment teams
Databricks	$153K–$343K	Posted bands; pre-IPO equity component
Ramp	~$236K median	High-growth fintech, posted bands

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Where FDE Jobs Are Located

FDE Pulse tracks 232 roles in New York, NY, 81 in San Francisco, CA, and 77 fully remote roles. New York, NY is the center of gravity in the tracked market, with San Francisco, CA still a major hiring base.

That distribution fits the work. Forward deployed teams often sit near customers, sales leadership, implementation partners, and industries where complex deployments create the most value. Financial services, enterprise software, government-adjacent work, and large operational teams all create demand for engineers who can bridge the gap between product and adoption.

FDE Pulse reports that 6% of tracked FDE roles are remote-eligible. Remote options exist, but this is not a market built around them.

A remote label also deserves a closer read. Some roles allow remote work within a specific region. Some require regular customer travel. Some use remote language for recruiting and expect the engineer to spend a large share of the job on-site once a customer engagement starts.

Location is part of the job design. An FDE working from a major office may have easier access to product teams and sales leadership. A remote FDE may get more autonomy, but can also become the person who handles every issue that falls between functions. Neither arrangement wins automatically.

If remote work is your priority, filter aggressively and ask direct questions about travel, team location, customer coverage, and how often engineers work alongside implementation or product teams. “Remote” can mean very different things when the role exists to solve problems in the field.

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.

FDE Seniority Mix

FDE Pulse tracks 838 mid-level roles, 223 Senior+ roles, and 141 manager/lead roles. The market is hiring most heavily for engineers who can contribute independently without requiring a company to hand them an account strategy, deployment plan, and operating manual.

Seniority tier	Tracked roles	What employers are likely looking for
Mid-level	838	Engineers who can ship, communicate with customers, and learn a new environment quickly
Senior+	223	Technical judgment, ownership across a deployment, and credibility with senior stakeholders
Manager/lead	141	Team leadership, operating discipline, and the ability to turn customer work into repeatable systems

Mid-level does not mean easy. It often means the company wants someone who can write code, handle ambiguity, and keep a customer conversation moving without needing constant rescue from a more senior teammate.

Senior roles tend to put more weight on judgment. You may be expected to decide whether a customer request belongs in a one-off solution, a shared implementation pattern, or the product roadmap. That decision affects engineering effort, customer expectations, and future sales motion.

Manager and lead roles carry a different burden. The work involves building the operating system around customer engineering: hiring, staffing, escalation paths, feedback loops, and a clear boundary between what the team delivers and what it should refuse to customize.

A company that has not worked out those boundaries can burn through strong FDE talent. The engineer becomes the workaround. The customer gets used to it. Product debt piles up quietly.

That is why seniority should not be the only filter. Scope matters more. A mid-level role with clean ownership and strong product partnership can be better career capital than a lofty title attached to a permanent implementation mess.

How to Evaluate an FDE Role Before You Apply

Start with the customer. Who will you work with, and why do they need an engineer involved in the first place?

If the answer is a technically complex product with meaningful implementation work, that can be promising. If the answer is vague, the company may be using FDE as a catch-all title for problems it has not staffed properly.

Ask how product feedback moves from the field into roadmap decisions. Strong FDE organizations have a path for recurring problems. Weak ones collect customer pain in meeting notes and ask the same engineers to solve it again next quarter.

Ask what success looks like for the role. Deployment speed, adoption, expansion, technical quality, customer retention, reusable implementation patterns, and product feedback are all plausible answers. You want to know which one the company will reward when those goals conflict.

Then ask who owns the hard call when a customer wants something custom. That is where an FDE team either builds durable judgment or becomes a literal money pit.

The job descriptions on the board show the market. The interviews show whether a specific company understands the job it is hiring for.

Browse companies hiring FDEs to compare employers, then use the live jobs index to focus your search on roles with the scope, location, and compensation structure you want.

Frequently asked questions about FDE jobs

What does FDE stand for in job postings?

In tech postings, FDE means Forward Deployed Engineer, an engineer who embeds with customers to build and deploy custom solutions. The title was popularized by Palantir and is now used at OpenAI, Salesforce, Databricks, and many startups.

How much do FDE jobs pay?

Most Forward Deployed Engineer roles pay $130,000 to $300,000 in base plus bonus. Senior roles at AI labs reach $400,000 to $500,000 total compensation once equity is included.

Are there FDE jobs for 2026?

Yes. FDE hiring is growing into 2026, led by AI labs and enterprise SaaS companies staffing model-deployment teams. New postings open continuously rather than on a fixed annual schedule.

How do I apply for FDE jobs online?

Apply directly on each company's careers page or through a job board. There is no central last date. Find a live posting, submit your application online, and tailor your resume to show both production engineering and customer-facing work.

What is an AI FDE job?

An AI FDE deploys language models and agent systems at customer sites. The work centers on RAG architecture, agent workflows, and model evaluation, and it usually pays 10% to 20% above a standard FDE role at the same level.

Are FDE jobs remote?

Many are remote-friendly, but expect travel to customer sites for deployments. Roles tied to one large account or a regulated industry are more often on-site.

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

TLDR

What Is an FDE Job?

How Many FDE Jobs Are Open Right Now?

FDE jobs in 2026 (and what changed since 2025)

FDE Salary Expectations

FDE jobs salary

FDE AI jobs

How to apply for FDE jobs

Where FDE Jobs Are Located

Remote FDE jobs

FDE Seniority Mix

How to Evaluate an FDE Role Before You Apply

Frequently asked questions about FDE jobs

Key Takeaways

Sources

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

TLDR

What Is an FDE Job?

How Many FDE Jobs Are Open Right Now?

FDE jobs in 2026 (and what changed since 2025)

FDE Salary Expectations

FDE jobs salary

FDE AI jobs

How to apply for FDE jobs

Where FDE Jobs Are Located

Remote FDE jobs

FDE Seniority Mix

How to Evaluate an FDE Role Before You Apply

Frequently asked questions about FDE jobs

Key Takeaways

Sources

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