Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs: The Role and Who's Hiring

A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who works inside a customer’s organisation to make the company’s product solve that customer’s problem. On 3 November 2026, 293 forward deployed roles were open at 51 of the tech companies Tideline follows, 238 of them engineer roles at 50 companies, and one company, Databricks, posted 110 of them.

Today the title appears at AI labs, data platforms and developer-tool companies alike. This article explains what the job is, how it differs from nearby roles, and who is hiring for it now.

What is a forward deployed engineer?

The job is easiest to understand from the postings themselves. Three read on 3 November 2026, from Palantir, OpenAI and Anthropic, describe the same shape of work:

• Working inside the customer. Palantir’s London posting describes small teams that embed with a customer and own a project from the first conversation to shipping. OpenAI’s describes leading deployments of its models with strategic customers, embedded with their teams, from discovery and scoping through to rollout.
• Building what this customer needs. Custom applications, data pipelines and AI workflows built for one customer’s situation, on top of the company’s own product. Anthropic’s posting lists building production applications on its models inside customers’ systems.
• Bringing the field back home. All three ask FDEs to feed what they learn back to the company: OpenAI to its research and product teams, Anthropic to its product and engineering teams, so that the next customer’s deployment is easier.
• Travel. Palantir expects 25 to 50% travel, OpenAI up to 50%, and Anthropic 25 to 50% to customer sites.

Where the title comes from. The title is most associated with Palantir, which says in its own postings that it pioneered the position of embedding engineers directly with customers. Palantir builds its teams around three roles it calls Echos, Deltas and Devs, and its forward deployed software engineers are the Deltas. Palantir is not among the companies Tideline follows, so it is not in the numbers below.

Forward deployed engineer vs software engineer vs solutions engineer

Palantir’s careers pages put the difference with software engineering in one line: a product software engineer’s focus is “one capability, many customers”, a Delta’s is “one customer, many capabilities”. Solutions engineers sit closer to sales: Tideline files them with technical sales, alongside sales engineers and pre-sales roles, because they usually help customers see how a product fits before and while they buy it. In the same data on the same day:

	Forward deployed engineer	Software engineer	Solutions engineer
Main focus	One customer’s problem, end to end	The company’s product, for all its customers	Showing customers how the product fits their needs
Where it sits	Delivery or business development	Product engineering	Technical sales
Open roles on 3 Nov 2026	238 at 50 companies	2,010 at 232 companies	299 at 67 companies
Remote	44 (18%)	503 (25%)	93 (31%)
Yearly US dollar ranges posted	117	886	101
Middle of the low ends	$182,000	$190,600	$100,000
Middle of the high ends	$250,208	$267,100	$173,576

“Software engineer” here means titles with “software engineer” in Tideline’s software engineering field; “solutions engineer” means titles with “solutions engineer” or “solution engineer”. The solutions engineer ranges are base pay: many sales-side postings also give on-target earnings with commission, which these figures do not include.

Companies hiring forward deployed engineers

Twenty companies have three or more forward deployed roles open, 249 of the 293 between them. “Engineer titles” counts the roles with engineer in the title; the rest lead or manage FDE teams, or work alongside them as deployment strategists and engagement managers. Each row links to the company’s own job board or careers page.

Tideline is independent and is not affiliated with any company or job platform mentioned here. Company names are used only to identify where roles are open.

Company	Forward deployed roles	Engineer titles	Main locations	Remote	Job board
Databricks	110	80	New York (10), Washington (10), London (9)	Yes (12)	Careers page
OpenAI	31	26	New York (9), San Francisco (7), Seattle (4)	No	Job board
Cohere	13	11	Ottawa (4), Toronto (4), London (3)	Yes (6)	Job board
Mistral AI	13	12	Paris (6), London (3), Montreal (3)	No	Job board
Cloudflare	9	9	Austin (2), London (2), San Francisco (2)	Yes (2)	Careers page
Snowflake	9	7	Menlo Park (4), London (1), Sydney (1)	Yes (2)	Job board
Truelogic	9	9	Bogotá (1), Santo Domingo (1), São Paulo (1)	Yes (9)	Job board
Anthropic	7	4	New York (3), London (2), San Francisco (2)	No	Job board
Intercom	5	2	Dublin (2), San Francisco (2), Chicago (1)	No	Job board
MongoDB	5	4	Gurugram (2), Cork (1), Dublin (1)	No	Careers page
Stripe	5	2	Atlanta (2), Chicago (2), New York (2)	Yes (2)	Careers page
ElevenLabs	4	4	London (1), New York (1), San Francisco (1)	Yes (4)	Job board
H Company	4	4	Austin (1), New York (1), Paris (1)	No	Job board
Lovable	4	2	Boston (2), London (2), New York (2)	No	Job board
NearForm	4	4	No city given	No	Job board
Nebius	4	4	New York (2)	Yes (2)	Careers page
Reflection AI	4	4	New York (2), San Francisco (2), Seoul (2)	No	Job board
Meticulous AI	3	3	London (2), San Francisco (1)	No	Job board
PagerDuty	3	3	London (1), New York (1), San Francisco (1)	Yes (1)	Job board
Xero	3	3	Vancouver (2), Sydney (1)	No	Job board

Databricks dominates: 110 of the 293 roles (38%), many of them posted by industry, from financial services and healthcare to retail, manufacturing and the public sector. AI labs (OpenAI, Mistral AI, Cohere, Anthropic, Reflection AI) are the next biggest group, and data, cloud and developer companies (Snowflake, Cloudflare, MongoDB, Stripe, PagerDuty) make up much of the rest. The other 31 companies have one or two roles each, 44 in all.

Spotted an error or want a listing corrected? Email [email protected].

Where the roles are, and how many are remote

Of the 238 engineer roles, 44 are remote (18%), 65 hybrid and 24 on-site; 105 don’t say. That is less remote than software engineering as a whole, which fits a job built around customers’ sites. Truelogic posts all 9 of its FDE roles as remote, ElevenLabs 4 of 4, Cohere 6 of 13 and Databricks 12 of 110.

City	Forward deployed engineer roles
New York	43
San Francisco	29
London	19
Paris	10
Washington	10
Seattle	9
Austin	8
Boston	8
Seoul	8
Chicago	7

New York leads, ahead of San Francisco. By country, 133 roles list the United States, 24 the United Kingdom, 11 each Canada and France, and 8 South Korea.

What forward deployed engineer jobs pay: employer-posted ranges

129 of the 238 engineer roles show a pay range set by the employer: 118 in US dollars, 6 in Canadian dollars, 3 in pounds and 2 in other currencies.

For the 117 with a yearly US dollar range, all for roles in the United States, half start at $182,000 or more and half reach $250,208 or more at the top. That is a little below software engineer roles in the same data ($190,600 and $267,100) and well above the base pay posted for solutions engineers.

These are the ranges employers wrote on their own postings. Many US postings give a different range for each city, and the posting says which applies; they show what these companies say they will pay, not what a given person will be offered.

Finding forward deployed engineer jobs on Tideline

• Search for “forward deployed”, live, and narrow by country, remote and minimum pay.
• Many FDE roles are at AI companies: AI Jobs: Which Companies Are Hiring for AI Roles Right Now covers AI engineers, ML engineers and the rest of AI hiring.

Every role links to the employer’s page. Before you apply, Readback shows your resume the way the hiring software on the other side reads it.

How this data was collected

Tideline reads the public job boards of the 433 tech companies it follows, hosted on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby, every day. It does not read job sites or aggregators, and it does not cover every employer. On 3 November 2026, 429 of those companies had open roles, 26,269 in all.

A role counts here when its title contains “forward deployed”, “forward-deployed” or “FDE” as a whole word, in any field. That matters because Tideline files 20 forward deployed engineer roles under “other functions” when the title names an industry (Databricks’ “Communications, Media, Entertainment & Games” roles, for example); they are counted here as the engineering roles they are.

Data notes:

• 55 of the 293 roles are not engineer titles, at 13 companies: 39 managers and leads of FDE teams, 6 deployment strategists, deployment leads and engagement managers, and 10 others, including programme and product managers and a forward deployed data scientist.
• 5 titles say “forward deployment” rather than “forward deployed” (at MongoDB, BetterUp and Databricks) and are not counted.
• 127 of the 238 engineer roles do not state a level; 83 are senior and 21 lead or staff.
• The travel figures come from three postings read on 3 November 2026, not from every role; postings change, and the travel line varies by team and location.
• Pay figures are the middle values of the posted ranges’ low ends and high ends, not averages, and only where at least 10 postings in one currency show a range.
• The figures describe the companies Tideline follows on 3 November 2026, not the whole market for these roles.