Forward Deployed Engineer — open roles, skills, and who's hiring
There are 205 open roles carrying "forward deployed" in the title tracked by the Agentic Ready Jobs Index, as of 12 June 2026 — the single most common job-title phrase in agentic hiring right now. The index files most FDE postings under agent engineering, because the work is building agents; the adjacent field and solutions category adds another 46 roles across 15 companies. This page covers both the title and the wider field category it belongs to.
What a forward deployed engineer is
A forward deployed engineer is a software engineer who builds inside the customer's environment instead of on the vendor's product. Palantir coined the title; in 2026 the AI industry has adopted it wholesale, because getting an agent working against a real enterprise's data, systems, and constraints is engineering work that cannot be done from headquarters. An FDE ships production code — the "deployed" part is the engineer, not just the software — while carrying a second job of translating between what the customer asked for and what the product can do.
The 205 current FDE postings show how the role has specialised already: "Forward Deployed Software Engineer", "Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer", "Forward Deployed Engineer — ML", US-government variants, and Brex's "Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Agent Builder". The common thread is that the customer's environment is the codebase. That makes the job part consulting in rhythm — travel, customer deadlines, demos that have to work — while remaining an engineering role in substance and in hiring bar.
The broader field and solutions category the index tracks alongside it is the pre-sales and architecture variant: solutions architects and engineers (39 of the 46 postings) who design AI deployments, run evaluations and proofs of concept, and carry technical credibility into sales conversations, without owning the implementation the way an FDE does. Databricks dominates this category, hiring solutions architects by region (Japan, India, Taiwan) and vertical (retail and CPG appear in eight separate titles).
Skills and tools that appear in real postings
10 of the 46 field and solutions roles (22%) are remote, against a 13% index-wide share — though FDE roles proper typically trade that back through customer travel.
How to break in
FDE hiring values demonstrated shipping over pedigree: the postings span founding-engineer startups to Palantir's structured pipeline, and 27 of the 46 field-category roles are mid-level. Product engineers who have done customer-facing integration work, and consultants who genuinely write production code, are the two standard profiles. For the solutions-architect variant, platform certifications plus a vertical (retail, public sector, financial services) match how the current postings are actually sliced.
Adjacent roles: agent engineer is the same build skill pointed at one product, AI engineer sits closer to the model, agent ops engineer runs what FDEs deploy, and AI governance lead is who you negotiate with inside the customer. The full dataset is on the Agentic AI Jobs Index and the tracker.
Skills appearing in real postings
Hiring for this role right now
- Palantir 58 roles Denver Careers ↗
- Databricks 43 roles San Francisco Careers ↗
- OpenAI 31 roles San Francisco Careers ↗
- Mistral AI 14 roles Paris Careers ↗
- Cohere 8 roles Toronto Careers ↗
Live from the Agentic AI Jobs Index, updated 16 June 2026.
Salary
A 2026 Perspective AI analysis of 169 active FDE postings found 131 disclosed ranges, with typical base pay of $150,000–$248,000 and a midpoint near $200,000 — base only, US-weighted, and skewed by AI-lab postings at the top. Glassdoor tracks the same title from self-reports. None of the 46 field and solutions postings in the 12 June 2026 snapshot disclosed a range, so the index has no posting-based figure of its own yet.
Sources: Perspective AI — 2026 FDE compensation report · Glassdoor — forward deployed engineer