I analyzed 292 open Forward Deployed Engineer jobs. Here is the data.

Who is hiring

Three companies account for 250 of the 292 openings:

• Palantir: 95 (they coined the title, and still call many of these roles "Deployment Strategist")
• Databricks: 85
• OpenAI: 70

Then a long tail: Cohere and Scale AI (13 each), Sierra, Writer, Modal, Baseten, Ramp, and Sardine.

What it pays

Of the 40 roles that disclosed a US pay band, the median ran $197K to $294K, topping out at $390K plus equity at OpenAI and Sierra, with a floor around $137K. That is senior-software-engineer money for a role a lot of engineers have never heard of. International and most Palantir roles did not publish bands, so the true market is likely even broader.

Three things that surprised me

1. 98% of these roles are customer-facing. This is the defining trait. It is not a backend role with occasional meetings. It is an engineer who lives in the customer's world, and if that sounds terrible to you, this is not a role you would enjoy occasionally. It is the whole job.

2. The title is chaos. The same role goes by at least four names: Forward Deployed Engineer (152), Forward Deployed Software Engineer (58), AI or Deployment Engineer (43), and Deployment Strategist (36). If you only search one term, you miss most of the market.

3. The job descriptions undersell the technical bar. JDs emphasize customer-facing work, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), Python, and integrations. But SQL and algorithms show up in only about a third of them, even though every FDE loop I have seen tests live coding and SQL under time pressure. The description sells the breadth. The interview tests the depth.

The other details

• Geography: about 48% USA, but genuinely global (UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea). Roughly 29% are flagged remote-friendly.
• Seniority: 62% are mid-level or IC, not staff or principal. You do not need to be a 15-year veteran to break in.
• Travel: 44% of descriptions mention it. OpenAI's field roles say "up to 50%," Databricks clusters around 15 to 25%, and platform/infra roles are often under 10%.

Method and caveats

Pulled from public ATS boards in July 2026, matched on title (forward deployed / FDE / deployment strategist / AI deployment engineer), de-duped, filtered to technical roles, with all 292 descriptions read for the skills breakdown. It is a point-in-time snapshot, and the market moves week to week.

Full breakdown with the charts (by company, pay, geography, seniority, and required skills) is here: https://rungcode.io/reports/forward-deployed-engineer-jobs

If you are actually prepping for one of these loops, that is the whole reason I started pulling this data. Happy to answer questions in the comments.