Forward Deployed Engineer job title trend since Apr 2011
Engineering · Emerging · in 4.6% of HN hiring posts · 369 open roles at 39 companies · median $216k · first seen Sep 2011
Who is hiring for it
Open postings on their own job boards, read 22h ago12 of 39 companies (top 12 shown)
| # | Company | Open roles | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Databricks | 115 | |
| 2 |  Palantir | 59 | |
| 3 |  OpenAI | 23 | |
| 4 |  Cohere | 19 | |
| 5 |  LangChain | 19 | |
| 6 |  ElevenLabs | 16 | |
| 7 |  Cognition | 15 | |
| 8 |  Cloudflare | 10 | |
| 9 |  MongoDB | 8 | |
| 10 |  Anthropic | 7 | |
| 11 |  Scale AI | 7 | |
| 12 |  Nebius | 6 |
Open roles
8 of 369; company pages list the rest| Role | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering- NYCOpenAINew York City$302k to $385k | OpenAI | New York City | $302k to $385k |
| Sr. Deployment Strategist, FDE - Communications, Media, Entertainment, & GamingDatabricksUnited States$220k to $302k | Databricks | United States | $220k to $302k |
Forward Deployed AI Engineer TuringNew York, New York, United States$200k to $250k | Turing | New York, New York, United States | $200k to $250k |
Senior/Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Applied AI SnowflakeUS-CA-Menlo Park$200k to $270k | Snowflake | US-CA-Menlo Park | $200k to $270k |
Forward Deployed Engineer IntercomChicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California$180k to $200k | Intercom | Chicago, Illinois; San Francisco, California | $180k to $200k |
Forward Deployed Engineer RenderSF or Remote (US/Canada)$236k to $289k | Render | SF or Remote (US/Canada) | $236k to $289k |
| Senior Forward Deployed EngineerCloudflareHybrid$194k to $266k | Cloudflare | Hybrid | $194k to $266k |
Senior/Staff FDE - CUA Snorkel AINew York City, NY (Hybrid); San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)$180k to $320k | Snorkel AI | New York City, NY (Hybrid); San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) | $180k to $320k |
Share of Hacker News hiring posts
202 posts since Apr 2011 · +138% in 6 monthsSeptember 2026 13 of 256 postings, 5.1%
Related titles
About this title
An engineer who ships software inside a customer's environment, part builder and part consultant; Palantir coined it, AI labs made it common.
Also counted: FDE, forward deployed, deployed engineer
First sighting
...areas of the global economy. Current openings: -Engineer -Forward Deployed Engineer -Interaction Designer -Visual Designer -System Admin -PM -QA...
Median posted salary $216k from 170 postings that state a base pay range (the median of their midpoints, USD a year). Not a survey of what people earn.
Sources: Hacker News Who is hiring threads and about 130 public job boards, read weekly. A title's share is not the job market's size. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.